Stearns County Portal Case Study

A visionary initiative has been developed by several Minnesota Counties to provide an Internet based system that connects constituents, employees and partners to information, people and process in real-time. Saturn Systems has been working with Stearns County, MN since June 2005 to redevelop their county website based around the concept of constituent “personalization”. In recent years, Stearns has been at the forefront of the “eCounty” concept and plans to extend it to all aspects of their website. This initiative will provide a “virtual county” where the County’s relationships with constituents are augmented through web enabled services delivery, allowing full utilization of the Internet for many County Government services. Patrons of Stearn’s database driven web site include County citizens, business partners, visitors, other government agencies and all other stakeholders in County Government.

In October of 2005, Saturn was contracted by Stearns to develop the initial Phase of the eCounty website, according to the specifications derived in a previously contracted design document.   The screen below is presented when the eCounty user has successfully logged in to their account. Important features to note include the District Details and associated Map links, Property Information details, and the site template management.

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GIS System Interface

The District Details and associated Map links yield details and PDF maps acquired in real-time from Stearn County's ARCXML GIS system for the particular user based on their Property Address or Parcel ID. Behind the scenes, this data is acquired via web service that executes the necessary XML interface to obtain the data. An example set of Details would be the user’s School District . This page lists contact information for all school board members in the user’s school district. The other links behave similarly. The Map link returns a printable PDF map of the particular district with the user’s location pinpointed.

Tax System Interface

The Property Information link yields detailed information about the user’s property, based on parcel ID. This link will present a set of information for the property owner including tax payment history, permit history, maps and photographs of their property, and a wealth of related information. All this data is obtained from Stearns internal AS400 system in real time.

Content Management

All page layout and template design is handled using the RedDot™ Content Management system. This allows Stearns administrative staff to modify links, page content and templates in a convenient manner, and apply changes to the entire site. All the interactive code of this site is implemented using Microsoft .NET technology.

Technologies Used:

• Microsoft Visual Studio .NET
• Microsoft SQL Server
• RedDot Content Management