Although at the forefront of open source software adoption by encouraging government-funded organizations like Multimedia Victoria and Open Source Victoria, the state's DSE has quietly been working on ZAPP for the past two years.

"The first business case was done in November 2000 which identified the need to develop a system to look after document flow," Tyrer said. "In 2001 we decided to go with Zope and it was a bit of a fight to get that through because we didn't use much open source technology at the time."

The DSE had contracted Zope Corporation to do the custom development but after performing an initial scope, the company pulled out of the local market in 2002. After going to tender, the DSE chose Melbourne-based open source service provider Obsidian Consulting as its development partner for ZAPP.

"ZAPP takes everything through and stores it at each different legislative process and date-stamps everything at each point, taking snapshots of every planning scheme so people can look at how it has changed," Tyrer said.

The project, going since 2003 with Obsidian, will officially finish development this week.