The Nunavut Wildlife Management Board (NWMB or Board) is an Institution of Public Government established in 1994. The NWMB was established in accordance with the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement (NLCA), which was ratified on May 25, 1993. The Board is the main instrument of wildlife management in the Nunavut Settlement Area (NSA) and is a co-management Board that consists of nine appointed members.  The Board and its co-management partners work together to combine the knowledge and understanding of wildlife managers, users, and the public to make decisions concerning the management of wildlife in Nunavut.

The existing NWMB web site is over 8 years old and no longer met the needs of the organization or its proponents.  In addition, only resources with a high degree of technical knowledge could update content on the site.

The NWMB recognized the need to migrate their web assets to a contemporary platform. They did not wish to be tied to a proprietary solution, and thus specifically sought out an OpenSource CMS solution.

MarketAccess was selected to perform the site redesign, implementation and hosting of the Joomla CMS platform. Prior to development of the new web site, existing web assets were migrated from the existing hosting provider to MarketAccess’ servers.

NWMB selected the Joomla platform due to its extensive community support, ease-of-use, and extensive app library to add tightly integrated enhanced features to the web site, such as a permissions-based document repository, image galleries, and form builder.

MarketAccess met with NWMB on-site in Iqaluit for a two day braining storming and planning session. Initial prototypes for the site architecture and several custom applications were completed during these sessions.

Back in Ottawa, MarketAccess prepared several design concepts for consideration and refined the prototypes for NWMB review and approval.

MarketAccess was also responsible for migrating over a 1000 Word/PDF documents from the old web site to a document management system.

Content from the old site was migrated to the new site, and at this time new content was also integrated. This was completed in English, Inuktitut, and Inuinnaqtun.

The Joomla platform allows for cost-effective development of custom integrations: in the case of NWMB, a requirement existed for two custom business applications. MarketAccess built these applications as integrated CMS applications:

1. A Decision Management system to allow NWMB to easily manage the workflow related to Board decisions. This system contains an administrative backend to allow NWMB staff to manage workflow, and a public view that allows the public to view decisions and versioning history.
2. A Funding Application System. This system allows funding applicants to create an account to management funding applications. Users can then complete 1 or more on-line applications for funding, and view the workflow status of applications. NWMB staff manage workflow related to the applications, and generate documentation for offline storage for approved applications.