Brevard County Sheriff's Office Uses Drupal

Brevard's top law enforcement agency, the Brevard County Sheriff's Office, has just completed implementation of the Drupal Content Management system for their local precinct's intranet project.

Beginning with East Precinct as a beta in June of 2010, the goal of sharing intelligence across five geographically separated precincts will be accomplished by July of 2010.

The Sheriff's Office covers seventy-two miles of Florida's East Coast and serves as the law enforcement agency responsible for the unincorporated areas of the county. Brevard is home to the Kennedy Space Center, several defense contractors, the busy Port Canaveral and the Patrick Air Force Station.

There was a need for timely and easy to access communication at the precinct level, as well as a secure and tested content management system.

Brevard had immediate needs to get information to law enforcement personnel including daily pass-on information of significant activity, current locally wanted people, and to open avenues of discussion while making the data convenient and accessible from the mobile laptops that Deputies have in their vehicles. By using Drupal and http to access this information over a wireless broadband the speed at which this data can be retrieved has been increased tremendously.

Drupal assists in the collection and organization of a large amount of daily activity and makes it easy to access and search from anywhere in the county.

Most of the installation was completed using standard Drupal core modules like Views and CCK. Table Wizard and Migrate offered a ready solution for the importation of some of their legacy data from a Microsoft Access Database.

A few community modules were also utilized including Subscriptions, CKEditor, and IMCE.

A collection of galleries are available to document known gang-members and to make this information available quickly and easily as well.

More and more government agencies are seeing the benefits of opensource software and are using Drupal as their CMS of choice. Michel Walsh has a brief article at govfresh.com