 |
Isle of Anglesey County Council (IOACC) is the local authority for the island of Anglesey in North Wales.
|
The Council uses Orchard Housing, a third-party online system for managing social housing. Part of the system is a self-service portal to which members of the public has access.
We now have a secure bilingual portal for Anglesey residents to check their housing rent balance, report a repair and amend their personal information.
The need for a multilingual application
The Council’s policy is that all public services must be provided bilingually in English and Welsh. While the Orchard Housing system has some built in bilingual capability additional functionality was required by IOACC.
Why LinguaSkin?
Because LinguaSkin is non-invasive it does not interfere with an existing site or application. The Council immediately saw that it could be a solution in providing the Orchard Housing portal bilingually to the public. The Council spoke to Orchard Housing who was happy for the collaboration with LinguaSkin to go ahead.
It’ll make third party online products more attractive to organisations like us who require a bilingual interface.
Other online self-service portals for services such as licensing and leisure would provide an improved user experience for the citizen but they are not available bilingually. The Council realised that it could use LinguaSkin with other applications that it currently uses.
It’s enabling the public to access bilingual services online and it fits in to our Customer Excellence project where we are developing additional customer access channels.
Interceptor Solutions was given access to the Council’s test server so LinguaSkin could be configured and implemented using a reverse proxy. The Council was then able to check the test site to smooth out any glitches before it was moved to its own server and made available to the public.
The process has been very flexible. Interceptor Solutions have been very supportive and have explained the process well. They’re very easy to work with.
Easy to use
It hasn’t been at all disruptive and took a reasonable amount of my time.
The Council did not have to provide huge input during the implementation process beyond agreeing and approving the contract, translating the text and checking the site.
As the site was thoroughly tested before being made available to the public, any risk was minimised, and unless Orchard or the council makes changes, there will be little ongoing maintenance.
LinguaSkin has given us another option when implementing third-party systems. We won’t have to wait while bilingual capability is being developed.
Cost-effective
Given that many third-party applications are not built to be multilingual, and there is usually a hefty cost attached to developing a multilingual application, the Council felt that the cost of LinguaSkin was very reasonable.
We will consider utilising LinguaSkin as a solution to making other applications accessible to the public in a bilingual format.
Key Points
- Capability - ability to have a multilingual site with minimal effort.
- Risk - thoroughly tested on reverse proxy site so minimal disruption to existing website.
- Quick - straight forward, minimal effort and rapid implementation.
- Third party software - implemented on a fully functional third party application.
- Cost - cost effective to implement and small ongoing operational costs compared to a software localisation approach.
Technical details
| Deployment: | Reverse Proxy on IIS on IOACC network |
| Web Server: | Apache Tomcat 7.0 |
| Application: | Orchard Housing Tenant Portal |
| Content types: | HTML, CSS, Javascript, Cold Fusion |
| Languages: | EN, CY |
| Num replacements: | 1224 |
Acknowledgement of support
Through its Welsh-language Technology and Digital Media Grant, the Welsh Government has funded several LinguaSkin implementation case studies to research the potential of multilingual software interfaces. Isle of Anglesey County Council and Interceptor Solutions acknowledge this support.
