The Tauranga District Council has become the first local government body in New Zealand to install Onstream Systems Ltd's latest software package, Trapeze Vault™. According to Waid Crockett, (left) the council's Information Manager, "We're really happy with the installation."

Trapeze Vault™, which has been up and running on a PC platform with Windows 2000© for some four months, is used mainly by council engineers to view large format district services plans for waste, storm water, water, roading and reserves. The council has a number of different versions of the software. "On the higher-end versions we are able to add records and alter metadata,” Waid says. "It's also available via our web-based intranet to some 350 PCs. Initially we put 17,000 large format City Services plans up on our system," he said. "They are big plans. Each plan is about 500KB in size - this equates to A1 or A0 size plans".

Business Issue - Getting plans online and available to a wider audience with easier searchablility
Tauranga District Council needed to get all their plans online and available to a wider audience with easier searchability. Having plans available electronically would mean that information would be available earlier than the paper plans normally would be. Thinking of the future, the council needed any new system to integrate easily with their existing systems particularly their GIS (snap shot below). Being able to move all the paper plans off-site was going to be a big plus for the council as their cabinets were beginning to take over.

Tauranga District Council's GIS using Trapeze Vault to view Services Plans

Waid was approached by David Kelly of Onstream Systems, who described Trapeze Vault to him. "Onstream Systems were in the right place, at the right time" said Waid. Having heard everything that Trapeze Vault could do and having had a look at the existing market, Waid didn’t find anything that could match Trapeze Vault’s functionality, in particular the ease with which it could be used over the Internet.

Waid said the decision had been made to purchase because the software was the best suited for the project they were considering at the time. "For our application it’s a very good system. It integrates easily with our desktop GIS system, ArcView and with our Corporate System Origen for viewing the survey and title plans," Waid said.

Onstream Systems and Tauranga District Council then set about implementing a pilot project to a limited number of users. "This helped work through any issues with users and we were able to develop a final specification and design." The pilot only needed to run for about a month before the full system was implemented.

Before Trapeze Vault was finally installed, the council outsourced the data capture of their plans. A data capture company in Auckland scanned all the City Services plans and organized the metadata in the correct format for importing into Trapeze Vault which was carried out in-house by the Information Systems department. Bob Harris was in charge of populating Trapeze Vault and in his opinion "the import was very simple" to do.

"The largest single import was 15,000 images which I started in the evening and in the morning, every single image was successfully imported" said Bob.

As an added advantage, using Trapeze Vault, the council was able to find and fix discrepancies in their legacy databases that had never been able to be done before.

After implementation, the council was very pleased with the complete set up and intends to purchase more licenses in the future as the audience base increases.

Since the successful launch, the council has imaged all its "live" survey, DPS plans and titles. This is an extra 16,000 documents.

The council has also integrated Trapeze Vault™ with the Corporate System Origen. This integration matches the financial information with the planning, titles and survey information.

Tauranga District Council's corporate system - Origen - displaying the title and survey plans using Trapeze Vault

The council also uses the Landonline system from Land Information New Zealand (LINZ). New survey and title plans purchased from LINZ are sent electronically to the council and are loaded straight into the Vault database.

According to Waid Crockett, Trapeze Vault™ has been a very advantageous system to have at the council and there are plans to integrate it with their existing intranet mapping systems. The council will also make all their City Services and DPS plans available over the internet using the Vault Java client.

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