The public information portal of the Ministry of Finance of the Czech Republic was launched in its new form in May 2013. It is one result from an almost three-year project entitled “Optimisation and upgrade of the MF web portal”, the objective of which was to modernise selected online communication channels of the Ministry and thus facilitate end users’ orientation in the ever-increasing volume of content that we publish in electronic form.

In addition to the changes made to the user interface of the main information portal, the project also included in particular a technology upgrade of the unified editorial environment of the Ministry, which we also use for the department’s intranet, and also the modernisation of the Spořicí státní dluhopisy (Government Savings Bonds) and Státní pokladna (State Treasury) portals and others. The technology upgrade did not only mean a transfer to a new version of already purchased software, but also the implementation and modification of a whole series of other modules that will enable or facilitate content management across a large number of internal editors, and also content management in non-web formats.

One fundamental change within the framework of this technology upgrade was the replacement of the internal repository of attachments in non-web formats with a modern solution that will enable the structured and central storage of files in various formats. This solution will ensure compliance with the unified naming convention for documents, their versioning and archiving and, through the use of a sophisticated tag database, their connection to the web content offered to the portal visitor. Complete integration with the editorial environment means retention of existing content approval processes and of course also unified authentication of internal users.

Content migration was a separate chapter in the overall optimisation of the Ministry’s public information portal. Over the years there has been not only sharp growth in the volume of published electronic content, but there have also been changes to some themes, while a series of new ones have appeared. The implementation team – composed of both internal and external experts – therefore prepared a completely new overview of the offered content and a proposal for new information architecture and navigation structures, and over a period of several months worked hard to migrate tens of thousands of documents from one structure to the other so that the path to the required information for the end user or portal visitor was simplified and accelerated as much as possible.

FG Forrest, a.s. is the author of the new concept. The costs for the creation of the new concept, including an analysis/audit of the original version, the design of the new content structure (wireframes), prototype pages, categorisation of content and key words, content tagging and consultation activity were CZK 2,308,200 without VAT. The redesign and reimplementation of the OpenText Web Site Management technology was carried out by Internet Projekt, a.s. Both the supplier and the technology had been selected in previous years through an open public tender. The costs for the implementation of the “Optimisation and upgrade of the MF web portal” project were CZK 10,166,600 without VAT.

Editor-in-Chief of the Website of the Ministry of Finance of the Czech Republic