CAIRO: OVERVIEW

CAIRO (rather tenuously) stands for Committee Assistance Internet Retrieval and Storage.

CAIRO provides support to Member Services specifically and the council and its members more generally.

It gives the following benefits:

• Simplifies tasks for Member Services by providing a controlled environment
• Removes time consuming typing by automatically creating documents
• Eliminates printing by circulating documents over the Internet
• Saves lengthy web site editing by publishing documents directly to your public web site.

Central Components

Cairo operates on a shared server running Windows 2000, SQL Server and Internet Information Manager.

Cairo holds data within a database (SQL Server) and as independent document files.

You connect to Cairo from your own PC using Internet Explorer. No special software is required to access Cairo.

Officers working with documents use tools such as Microsoft Word for creating files to be stored in Cairo. Cairo can support all types of files, including scans, graphics and web pages.

Documents, Committees and Members

Cairo saves you time by taking documents, committees and members and joining them together in different ways - re-using the same information to create different "views".

For example: You can view a calendar of all the committees and when their meetings are. From this calendar, you can view all the details about a meeting, where it is, who attended plus any documents attached to the meeting - like agenda and reports.

Document Library

Cairo runs the equivalent of a document library. You take documents out of the library to work on them and return documents to the library so others can read them.

But this is an automated library! The Cairo library can send documents to users and members for you. Cairo cross-references documents with meetings and committees. Cairo can send changed documents to your public web site.

The library also stores all those little pieces of information, like venue names, officer details and so on, these bits are re-used all the time too.

The library of course allows you to search for information, by committee, by date and with "free text" - that is documents containing specific words.

Web Publishing

Cairo automatically transfers updates from the internal system to the public web site. So any changes to documents, meetings, committees or members are kept up to date on the public web site without intervention.

Cairo will not publish documents which are secret or are not yet ready for publication.

For information like lists of councillors these are all maintained centrally - you do not have to re-type the same information in different locations