Belgium.be Government Portal Live on SDL Tridion

On May 29 the new Belgian federal portal, www.belgium.be, was launched by Yves Leterme, Prime Minister of Belgium. The new portal is a result of close cooperation between the Belgian Federal Government Services for ICT (Fedict) and the Department of External Communication of the chancellery and provides access to all online information and services of the government. Belgium.be runs on SDL Tridion’s Web Content Management solution. Partners IBM and Amplexor were responsible for the integration.

The new portal www.belgium.be follows the clear objective of the government to offer all Belgians access to the Internet. User friendliness was key in the development process. The clear navigation structure of belgium.be efficiently and quickly leads the visitor to the information that he/she needs. Olivier Alsteens, Director External Communication of the chancellery of the Prime Minister: “The portal is not meant be a collection of as much information as possible. If that was the case, it would become an uncontrollable mess in no time. The portal is meant to quickly lead the user to the right place to find exactly the information that he or she needs: on the Web sites of the Federal Governmental Services, the Municipals, and the Provinces… In short on all the sites of the various governmental institutions. The federal governmental portal lets people find the answer to their questions using their own logic, not the logic of the institutions. This in itself is a huge “communication step” forwards.”

The portal offers access to 9000 pages, 472 downloadable publications, 1700 addresses and over forty online services and was built by a team of fifteen fulltime employees. The site is decentralized, managed by various administrations and is available in French, Dutch, German and English. More languages could follow in the future. “Multilingual requirements is exactly where the platform of SDL Tridion proves her strength”, “says Ronny Kenens, Director SDL Tridion Belgium. “Thanks to the unique BluePrint management functionality the government can now work centrally, in multiple languages and it’s very easy to reuse content and building blocks over the various sites. The intuitive and user friendly interface of the system makes it very easy to enter, manage and publish governmental information. The visitors of the new portal are offered a high quality user experience.”

Belgium.be is not the only governmental portal. At this moment a total of nine sites are live on SDL Tridion’s content management system all with their own “look & feel”. These Web sites hold over 12.000 pages together and are edited by over 25 Web editors.

Overview current live websites:

·         belgium.be (portal Belgium)

·         Kanselarij (portal Kanselarij of the First Minister)

·         Fedweb (portal of the federal employees)

·         Fedict (portal Federal ICT Services)

·         eid (portaal of the Electronic ID Card)

·         Felink (network from the government focusing on women)

·         cgvs (portal General Commisson for refugees)

·         Staatsveiligheid

·         Infoshop