16 October: London Borough of Camden and the Google Search Appliance has been named a Finalist in the Intranet category of the 2006 BSC Information Management Award

Past user group meetings:
October Meeting: Fenland District Council
June Meeting: Stoke-on-Trent city council
March Meeting: Bristol city council

12 April: APLAWS technical lead Ainga Pillai was invited to speak at the Open source & sustainability conference at Said Business School, Oxford University. The focus of this event was exploring the sustainability of IT projects beyond their initial funding.

26 January:

4 January: The first version of the partnership protocol for joint procurement between local authorities drawn by Camden legal team is now available. As an additional note, it's important that all partners must (whilst no formal delegation of powers to the Partnership is envisaged) obtain all approvals to participate in the partnership (complying with their respective Constitutional requirements) sooner rather then later so as not to hold up the execution of the legal documentation.

14 October: Outcomes of Cambridge user group available.

15 September: We've received further details on the ODPM funding from West Sussex. Camden is allocated with £8500 for the following tasks:
£1,000 Hosting of APLAWS+ website
£7,500 Establishing governance for the APLAWS+ User Group
Unfortunately this means that we would not be able to commission the website development work, the alternative we'd like to suggest is to get efforts directly from volunteers in the user group to carry this work forward.

Legal advice update: Camden's solicitor has put together a document that contains the initial advice on joint procurement. Post your suggestions or feedback here.

24 August: Next APLAWS user group meeting will take place on Friday, 7th October 2005. Cambridge City Council has kindly offered to host this event. Please visit the User Group section for further details.

1 August: On the 26th July we received the proposal from the ODPM about the legal transfer of the IPR and products from the ODPM to Camden and we have now instructed our lawyers to review the document from the ODPM and to draw up some guidance around the mechanisms for joint procurement in the future and we have started to draw up procurement specifications for the new APLAWS website.

We regret the delays to the processes that we started in the previous user group but we were unable to commission any work until it became clear that it was Camden and not another organisation that would own the IPR and other assets.

We would be interested in any proposals for ways of distributing APLAWS work jointly within the user group. Please either post your comment on the discussion forum or email Tracy Wang. Camden will be co-ordinating this and present the outcomes at the next user meeting (October-TBC) for discussion. Notes from the May user group meeting can be found here.

28 July: 2005 user survey is being carried out to make the user list more complete. More details...

6 May: Next APLAWS user group meeting will take place on Friday, 27th May 2005. Coventry City Council has kindly offered to host this event. Please visit the User Group section for further details.

19 April: Find the latest news about APLAWS on ZDNet UK: Managing content the open source way

30 March: APLAWS+ Best Practice Implementation documentation available for download.
This document is a Best Practice study of the implementation of APLAWS+. Three local authorities that have implemented APLAWS+ were chosen. The authorities selected were Fylde Council, Harrow Council and the States of Guernsey.

24 March: APLAWS+ 1.0.2 released!
APLAWS+ Technical Steering Committee is pleased to announce the March 2005 release of APLAWS+ 1.0.2. This new release includes new packages submitted and numerous bug fixes and enhancements. For full details please see the Release Notes.

After consultation with the APLAWS+ Technical Steering Committee, APLAWS+ 1.0.2 is now released under the GNU Lesser General Public License to encourage more active participation from the supplier community.

APLAWS+ 1.0.2 can be downloaded from here.

24 March: As part of the APLAWS+ Release, additional APLAWS+ related documentation have been released.

• APLAWS+ Subsite Guide: This is the complete documentation for the Subsite functionality in APLAWS+. It describes all aspects of the functionality and how to perform all related tasks, including step by step descriptions for setting up new subsites.
• APLAWS+ Comparison with other Content Management Systems: This document compares APLAWS+ to other content management systems(CMS) that are being used by local authorities. The intention of the document is not to make recommendations about which CMS is most appropriate for any given local authority, but rather it aims to provide guidance about how a useful comparison can be made for your given situation. The CMSs compared are:
  • APLAWS+
  • Obtree
  • Documentum
  • Microsoft CMS

London Borough of Camden Supporting the User Group in 2005 The London Borough of Camden will continue to support and develop the APLAWS user group and the wider APALWS communtiy throughout 2005 as part of our commitment to improving the system and increasing its user base. This support is not dependent on ODPM funding.
Planning for the post National projects phase of APLAWS has been underway for some time and two initiatives are already underway:

1. Technical Steering Committee
   In order to move the codebase forward and avoid incompatible versions, we have set up a Technical Steering Committee which will overview the March 2005 release of APLAWS. For practical reasons the committee is currently very small and consists of:
   • Ainga Pillai of London Borough of Camden
   • Matt Roberts of Runtime Collective
   • Tomislav Vujec of Red Hat
   Both of the suppliers involved are committed to providing resources for the steering committee for the next 12 months. We will provide more information and updates during the APLAWS - LGOL-net user group session on 8th of March 2005 in London.
2. APLAWS Roadmap
   For many authorities thinking about adopting APLAWS, the future direction of the application is very important. We are preparing a roadmap to present at the APLAWS - LGOL-net user group session on the 8th of March 2005 in London. This Roadmap will include future planned development, that already have funding allocated and proposals for work to be distirbuted to the open source development community.