Metlink is the face of public transport in Melbourne and Victoria. It represents a partnership of Melbourne’s train, tram and bus operators, and includes VicLink, which provides public transport information and services for regional Victoria.

Brief
The new Metlink website is a customized eZ publish Enterprise Level Content Management System that provides customers with a ‘one-stop-shop’ for information about services, fares and ticketing, direct to the public through the Internet. This new website has created a significant gain in efficiency as teams of people within Metlink can now easily and quickly manage and update the content.

Features
· Enterprise Content Management System
· Seamless Integration of Time Tables Data
· Accessibility Rating to AA
· Extranet for Call Centre
· Information duplication between Metlink and Viclink websites removed
· Personalization for Public Users

Check it out
Looking to check out a time table, look up fares and ticketing information, want to search the Metlink site, give feedback to Metlink or just visit the new home page of Metlink

Challenges
Building one of the world’s best public transport websites had two major challenges – technical and project management. The obvious technical challenge was designing and developing such a complex and integrated system. It involved extensive research, planning and consulting with numerous users and stakeholders. According to Martin Bauer, Managing Director of designIT , the website “is the most sophisticated deployment of the eZ Publish Content Management System in the Asia Pacific region.” To keep up with high traffic loads and have a high level of availability, the system makes use of clustered servers.

The project management challenge was in implementation. This involved major input and co-ordination from several major teams inside Metlink including the:

· Customer service team that executed Content Population
· Data team that provided Time Table Data and Structure
· Infrastructure that provided Hardware and Network Connectivity

There we several major external teams as well including Usability Testing, Load Testing and Hosting. The project took 18 months to design, develop and deploy. During this time, all these teams were under pressure from their usual business functions. To be able to participate and deliver above project expectation is a credit to their high level of professionalism – especially the Metlink teams.

Services Delivered
Key areas of designITs involvement in the Metlink Website project were:

Consulting
Researching and developing a comprehensive project plan with a design and functional specification that included Information Architecture.

Web Development
Design and Implementation of custom eZ Publish CMS and integrating into other software systems such as TransNET.

Web Project Management
Extensive project management was supplied in co-ordinate the large number of teams and people involved in the project.

eZ publish Technical Training
Metlink’s in-house developer was been official trained by eZ Systems so that Metlink can continue to develop the website in-house.

eZ Publish Developer Support
Providing advice, planning and direction to Metlink’s developer and management team regarding further customization of the solution.

Web Design
Redesign of Visual Interfaces to ensure that the pages could be constructed to comply with Accessibility Rating to AA

Maintenance
Providing Emergency Application Support and Planning when the system is under exceptional peak web traffic loads.

Wrap Up
eZ Publish is both a content management system (CMS) and a content management framework (CMF). The CMF aspect and the fact that it's an open source project allowed for the seamless integration of corporate data such as timetables and route, stop information.

Having produced over 50 sites using ez Publish, designITs experience with the product and expertise in areas such the creation of usable and accessible site, modern development methodologies all combined to produce the end product.

Find out more
· About eZ Publish
· Other work done by designIT
· Prices for designIT Solutions