The Solicitor General Portfolio is responsible for protecting Canadians and helping to maintain Canada as a peaceful and safe society. The Portfolio consists of the Department and four agencies: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) and the National Parole Board (NPB). The Department's role within the Portfolio is to support the Solicitor General in giving effective direction to the agencies. In practical terms, the Department helps to direct the work of the entire Portfolio, encompassing policing and law enforcement, national security, corrections and conditional release and as such, one of it’s responsibilities is to act as a distribution channel of information and current events.
The NewsDesk Portal Project for the Solicitor General’s Office was established to allow the independent agencies within the Portfolio to receive relevant daily media articles from news providers across Canada. This electronic media monitoring application is deployed on a centralized, common infrastructure to serve the Portfolio. This method of disseminating news is in contrast to the manual approach used to date where as many as 40 "cutters" are employed to read, extract and archive articles for review by ministers.
The success of this service has created a centralized infrastructure that may be extended as an enterprise-wide media monitoring service available to all Government of Canada (GoC) departments. It utilizes a unique, single full-feed download and parsing process, with all content available to the many participating departments through a central web server(s). This feed, coupled to a personalized filter, permits department-specific customers to set up a customized view of media articles matching the topics of interest for each participating department. It provides a scalable and robust infrastructure for 7/24 mission-critical operations, capable of being extended to over 150,000 users.
BAU Solutions Canada was asked to create the NewsDesk Portal using a complete Microsoft solution with high availability and scalability. It was designed and developed with an N-tiered architecture, running in a Webfarm environment (with MS Network Load Balancing) to achieve the desired level of functionality. The application was also designed to have a highly customizable interface layer with all data stored in XML format and presented through Cascading Style Sheets for ease of use and a flexible, adaptable user interface
|