The National Instutite of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the US Department of Commerce and was founded in 1901 as the first federal physical science research laboratory in the US. NIST scientists and technical staff have contributed to smoke detectors, image processing, X-Ray standards for mammography, high-speed dental drills, pollution control technology and much more.

NIST desired to move their 80,000 page static Web site to a content management system which would provide NIST staff and experts with the ability to easily post and manage Web site content.  Fig Leaf Software worked with NIST to understand their requirements and architect a solution which would ensure that the organization would achieve its goals.

NIST's legacy site had 80,000 pages of static content and suffered from some important problems with Web site content:

• no way to manage site information across organizational units
• no way to enforce design standards or "look and feel"
• no way to drive people to important content or content of interest to them

Having identified the problems, Fig Leaf worked with the NIST team to architect an enterprise solution built on industry standards. 

Fig Leaf launched nist.gov as part of a phased approach to bring all NIST content under one standard content management system, the CommonSpot Content Server, a product of PaperThin, Inc.  The current system utilizes CommonSpot in all of the main areas and it ties into legacy information and content while it is being migrated over into the CMS.  This is important because of the size and amount of data that NIST manages. The NIST Web site has more than 1,000 content contributors and the system serves content from content servers geographically distributed across the US with fail-over and backup systems in place. The home page being generated as HTML to reduce load time.

The entire site is built on an extensive taxonomy which relates content to their organizational units and their information architecture.  The Adobe Flash banner built into the home page template allows non-tech contributors with rights to manage photos on the home page.

The new site has an extensive "A to Z" index and subject area portals which display content based on taxonomy and organizational settings including:

• Programs and projects
• Instruments
• News & events
• Latest publications

One of the most complex portals developed was for Building and Fire Research.  The portal based system draws together content from multiple repositories and Fig Leaf Software integrated the Google Search Appliance in at the taxonomy level so users can search on terms and change results using the drop down to search by relevance and date or by:

• All content
• Projects & Programs
• News
• Events
• Staff Listing

The new site uses metatags from individual pages as content contributors tag content during the page creation or editing process. 

The new NIST public website has received great reviews for it's elegance and speed.  The home page is generated as HTML to enable quick load times.   Fig Leaf Software helped to improve the NIST's internal processes by simplifying the website maintenance process, establishing efficient content management workflow and enabling ubiquitous browser-based updating for authorized users nationwide. The results enabled NIST to easily update, produce, publish and maintain information in a timelier manner for their stakeholders and the public at large.