The Connecticut General Assembly (CGA) is the legislative entity responsible for making and repealing laws for the State of Connecticut. The Office of Information Technology Services has relied on Transit Solutions from Avantstar, Inc. for several years to automate document processing for the CGA’s intranet and Internet websites.

Each year, Transit Solutions helps the CGA publish and update more than 17,000 legislative documents on their sites. The actual volume is driven by legislative activity. IT Manager Cheryl Smith states, “I can’t even imagine how it would be possible to handle the sheer volume of documents without Transit Solutions. It would be a manual nightmare.”

CGA Senior Analyst Alfred Grabka explains, “When the Legislature is in session, we need to post amendments to bills on our website as soon as possible. We use Transit Solutions’ multithreading capabilities to keep up with content changes to keep the site current. When we are in session, the website is sometimes updated every few minutes with new content. It’s critical that the latest updates on the progress of bills be available as soon as possible. Transit Solutions allows us to do this quickly and effectively.”

EASY-TO-USE, 24/7 WEB DOCUMENT PUBLISHING MEETS GROWING DEMAND

The CGA’s 27 committees and more than 200 contributors publish and update a plethora of documents using Transit Solutions—calendars, bulletins, joint favorable reports, meeting agendas, and meeting minutes in addition to bills. “We continually add information to our websites. At any given time, there are 45 scheduled publications running on two servers with Transit Solutions. Thank goodness it’s so easy to use that anyone can publish documents without having to learn HTML,” says Smith. “Plus, there’s no training required for publishing. Transit Solutions converts the document to HTML and maintains the format of the original document.”