The Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) is one of Canada's largest research and lobbying organizations representing hundreds of Municipal Governments in Ontario. Restructuring and communications pressures led AMO to seek a system to connect thousands of villages, towns and cities with one another to share news, information, and to coordinate activities. To address these needs, Telepresence teamed with Bell Global Solutions to design and build Municom, a massive province-wide Intranet for Ontario municipalities.

Using a human-centred, participatory design methodology, we worked with founding organizations to understand their information production and consumption needs. Then, over a number of iterations, we designed and implemented an integrated suite of web-based applications which specifically matched their needs.

The solution was built using Microsoft NT/IIS and Microsoft Front Page as the key base applications with custom components built in C, Perl, and Visual Basic. The entire system was developed to run as a stand-alone system in a large Web Farm run by Bell Global Solutions.

The applications include numerous searchable databases, directories, news feeds, discussion groups calendaring systems, and more. A key application is a specially designed publishing system which enables the simple authoring, publishing, and maintenance of municipal information on the web site. Included in this are meeting agendas, minutes, policy papers, events, newsletters, and other municipal documents.

Municom is one of several large corporate Intranets designed and developed by Telepresence.