The Incredible Shrinking Outback
The Age
Tuesday June 19, 2007
Finding information about visiting Western Australia is now a lot easier - and smarter.
THE vast West Australian outback just got a little smaller, with Tourism WA launching a one-stop online portal to support the state's multibillion-dollar tourism industry.The Tourism eMarketplace is a 10-year, $9.8 million project funded by the West Australian Government to build a cohesive network of tourism websites aimed at local and international visitors. Tourism provides 72,000 jobs in Australia's largest state and generated $4.3 billion during the 2004/05 financial year.The Tourism eMarketplace is not customer-facing, but rather behind-the-scenes infrastructure that links 18 West Australian tourism sites, along with six others aimed at overseas markets, including New Zealand and Britain. The project has established westernaustralia.com as a portal for tourism information, allowing it and affiliated sites to access various state and federal data sources such as the federally-funded Australian tourism data warehouse. The Tourism eMarketplace will expand to offer industry-driven services such as online reservations, says Tourism WA chief information officer Colin MacDonald."Some of the key research we did found visitors to Western Australia weren't able to easily find tourism destination information, experience information and accommodation information," he says. "They'd be searching through about 100 small websites, which weren't always well designed and didn't reference each other well. We wanted to have a more adhesive industry view for finding things in Western Australia." Built on Microsoft's Sharepoint 2007, the Tourism eMarketplace leverages Sharepoint's new search and content management capabilities. As a proof of concept, Tourism WA's intranet - which services 150 staff throughout the state, Sydney, London, Munich and Tokyo - was also built on Sharepoint 2007. Distributed corporate material, as well as an outdated and static intranet, were hampering Tourism WA's efforts to enhance its operations. With limited staff to maintain the intranet, its information was often outdated and unreliable."We had a number of information sources on our intranet and we amalgamated them into one, so it provided faster and easier access," Mr MacDonald says. "Now it takes less effort to actually put things on the intranet, as a result of going to a content management system like Sharepoint. "We've reduced our compliance risk a little bit as well, because we've got all our compliance documentation on the intranet." Using Sharepoint 2007, Tourism WA produced a human resources site that handles existing paper-based forms electronically, built a single source of corporate policy information and created a "How do I?" section for common business requests for information. Microsoft Active Directory is also being updated for use as an online source for corporate directory information.Mr MacDonald says Tourism WA is not planning to use Sharepoint 2007's mobility and workflow features with Western Australia because "in a small organisation it is often easier to get off your seat, walk down the hall and see someone".While the focus is often on Sharepoint 2007's mobility and workflow features, many people don't realise that Sharepoint now features a powerful enterprise search engine, says Microsoft Australia's online services strategy manager, Harvey Sanchez."Tourism WA needed something that could not only index millions and millions of documents but could also integrate with third-party heterogeneous systems and provide a search interface for anybody trying to look up information about Western Australia," he says."With Sharepoint 2007, one of the main features has been the enterprise search element and we highlight that to customers now, that they can build a really cool indexing server without the need to put in a third-party search engine."If they want to put in a departmental search engine, they don't need to go through the cost associated with something like Fast or Autonomy, which are multimillion-dollar deployments. That's not to say they won't play nicely with each other; we actually do have Sharepoint 2007 inside organisations linking into third-party search engines like Autonomy, Fast, Endeca or Verity."NEXT LESSONSProblem: Various tourism websites promoting WA, and Tourism WA's own intranet were not well co-ordinated and had trouble staying up to date.Process: Microsoft's Sharepoint 2007 was used to build an e-marketplace to bring the various services together, firstly as an internal resource for Tourism WA.Possibilities: Tourism eMarketplace will expand to offer services such as online reservations.
© 2007 The Age