1 Purpose of document

This document provides guidance to government agencies and their partners on gaining leverage from the govt.nz portal infrastructure, and other e-government system building blocks, when developing their own web portal.

For this purpose, 'government agencies' is defined as comprising all central and local government organisations, excepting State Owned Enterprises, Crown Owned Companies, and Local Authority Trading Enterprises.

The govt.nz portal is based on a combination of agency-supplied metadata (complying with the NZGLS standard), and spidered government web pages.

Government agencies are obliged (by Cabinet mandate) to use the NZGLS standard for any development work involving discovery-level metadata, e.g. portals. Consequently, the components used for the govt.nz NZGLS-based portal (http://www.govt.nz/) are expected to be of considerable value to other government agencies. The document introduces the concept of a 'subject portal', a portal that uses a subset of the NZGLS metadata, re-packaged to suit the needs of a special interest group, e.g. the WorkSite portal (http://www.worksite.govt.nz) developed by the Department of Labour.

This Guide incorporates learning from the E-government Unit's (EGU) construction of govt.nz, and from WorkSite's re-use of some of those components. It refers extensively to the still developing e-government component architecture (explained below), and for that reason, detail in some areas is sparse and indicative at this stage.

The Guide only covers portal development, but readers should note that the components discussed are available for use in other situations as well, e.g. the Autonomy search engine would be an excellent tool for use in an agency intranet.

EGU expects this Guide to evolve as agencies engage further with the components concept, further developments take place, and agencies give more feedback about what guidance they need to assist them. Be sure to send us your comments about how to improve this document.