Presented at InnoTech Oregon 2013. All rights reserved.

1. Open Source and
Cloud as a Laboratory
for Innovation
A Case Study of Multnomah County’s Enterprise
Applications Strategy
Joshua Mitchell
joshua.mitchell@multco.us
IT Applications Manager, Enterprise and Web Applications
Multnomah County, Oregon

2. Taking the long view
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationallibrarynz_commons/4078338365/

3. Open source and Google
and Amazon... oh my

4. http://www.flickr.com/photos/nirak/644335254/

5. Google
Lower email delivery costs
16 exchange servers decommissioned
25 GB per mailbox (soon to be 100 GB)
Search that works
Collaboration: Drive and Groups
Anytime anywhere access
Active Directory integration
Gmail
Calendar
Drive
Docs

6. Impact of Google Apps
Employees are more resilient to change.
Ecosystem is growing—more add ons, more apps.
People are collaborating on documents without thinking
about it.
Distributing costs to the departments is easier—everything
is a license per user.

7. http://www.denverwater.org/Conservation/UseOnlyWhatYouNeed/PhotoGallery/#49

8. Amazon Web Services
Pay as you go
Scalability with EC2 machine images
S3 (Simple Storage Service)
RDS (Relational Database Service)
Solutions ready to go
Resource:
http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/the-total-cost-of-
ownership-tco-of-web-applications-in-the-aws-cloud

9. http://www.flickr.com/photos/gaborhojtsy/279354232/

10. Drupal
Content Management Framework - think Legos™
Open source
Heavily used open source project
(grammy.com, whitehouse.gov, State of Georgia, many more sites
in all sectors and in languages around the world)
Huge library of contributed code (modules)
Portland is a hub of Drupal activity
Entire platform is on AWS
LDAP (Active Directory) login

11. ~3 years
Sites
web.multco.us
commons.multco.us
commons.multcolib.org
multcolib.org
multcopets.org
multfood.org
Apps
GIS Datasets Tracker
Building Data Management Center
Hardware and Applications List (HAL)
Chartroom
Adult Care Home Program Accounting
Mental Health and Addition Services
Dataset
Public Sex Offender Registry
(so.apps.multco.us)
Event Planner for Library Programs and
Events
Library Art Inventory (8 hours to develop)

12. Public website
250 editors across the system
Dynamic permissions that are managed at the “site” level
One installation, one code base to maintain
Flexible feature set available to every site maintainer

13. Public Website Uptime*
Downtime includes patching and maintenance! (*Past year.)

15. Multco Commons
Community driven intranet
Blogs
Comments
Events
Collaborative editing
Centralized processes
Document repositories
Webforms
Simple online forms
Email workflow options
Easy to train staff

18. Library Website
Over 23,000 visit per day
Librarians are rock stars (tattoos and all)
Integrated site and catalog search
Planning and publishing over 800 events per month
Content first; device second
Responsive design
Working on translation for five target languages: English,
Spanish, Russian, Vietnamese and Chinese

21. http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/4100334593/

22. http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/5589769776/