The council of the city of Bristol, UK, is combining open source tools to offer its staff online access to its documents from any location. The move to open core document management system Alfresco and open source content management system Drupal also helps the city to reduce its operating budget, Computerworld UK reports.

The IT news site describes Bristols move to Alfresco and Drupal in two articles, one published on Sunday and one published last month.

On Sunday Computerworld reports that the council aims to reduce its annual operating budget by 70 million pounds (about 90 million euros). It says that making use of open source where possible is a key part of that plan. "Bristol's move towards council-wide open source adoption to save money started in 2010, and won central government support at the end of last year."

Bristol aims to make new uses of its modern document and content management system. It will enable e-government services, including allowing citizens to apply for housing licences, and letting city staffers to upload images on maintenance repairs using their smart phones and other digital equipment.

In June, the news site spoke with Gavin Beckett, chief enterprise architect at Bristol city council. Beckett says that the new website, based on Drupal, reduced the number of pages from ten thousand to three thousand. This speeds up searching and helps to complete transactions "much quicker, easier and more intuitive than previously".

The city of Bristol is one of Europe's more well-known examples of public administrations moving to open source. It has been working to reduce its dependency on proprietary software since 2005. Two years ago, its move to a vendor independent office suite stalled. At the time, Beckett explained that IT vendor lock-in at all other public administrations was hindering progress.

More information:
Computerworld UK news item
Computerworld UK news item
Computer Weekly news item
Computer Weekly news item