Digital Place
What is Digital Place?
Public-serving organisations and their community partners need to provide well-designed, accessible digital services that meet user needs while actively reducing operating costs. However, many organisations find themselves trapped by outdated legacy systems.
Because modern commercial platforms are often prohibitively expensive to license or integrate, organisations frequently resort to stitching together a disjointed mix of individual CMS, Form builders, Customer Accounts, and CRM packages. This fragmented approach is not only costly and frustrating to maintain, but it fails to deliver the seamless user experience that citizens expect today.
Digital Place solves this exact problem by providing a fully featured Digital Experience Platform (DXP) straight out-of-the-box. It brings together web content management, low-code forms, automated case workflows, and customer contact tools into a single, integrated environment—typically operating at a much lower total cost of ownership. Co-created with the public sector for the public sector, Digital Place acts as a unified digital engine that helps your organisation launch comprehensive digital strategies without unnecessary redevelopment or duplication of costs.
Delivered entirely as a secure Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution, Digital Place eliminates the burden of infrastructure management. Your teams no longer need to worry about hosting, routine software maintenance, or retaining specialised operations staff just to keep the platform running at peak performance. Instead, you can focus on what matters most: designing and improving the front-line services your communities rely on.
Feature packs
Flexibility, Integration, and Infinite Extensibility
Digital Place offers unparalleled flexibility through its modular "cube" architecture, containing over 150 pre-built functional components that accelerate your digital service delivery through reuse. Organisations can perfectly adapt the platform to their specific requirements by selecting from distinct feature packs, including Core DXP, Low-Code Application Platform (LCAP), CRM, and E-Commerce. Using built-in no-code and low-code tools, non-technical business users can rapidly design multi-stage web forms, map data objects, configure custom look-and-feel templates, and deploy automated approval workflows without writing a single line of code.
For more complex requirements, Digital Place acts as an open, highly extensible hub that breaks down legacy software constraints. Built on open standards, the platform natively provides and consumes OpenAPI-compliant RESTful web services, allowing you to seamlessly integrate your user experiences with existing back-office databases, ERPs, and line-of-business systems. Low-code data objects automatically generate their own headless REST endpoints, ensuring that data can sync dynamically across your broader technical ecosystem in real time.
For enterprise-tier requirements, Digital Place Enterprise expands this capability even further by providing a dedicated cloud development environment with an additional layer of software engineering freedom. Using our advanced client extensions framework, developers can build and deploy bespoke functionality, standalone microservices, and specialised scheduled jobs as isolated containers. Built using any development framework of your choice (such as React or Ruby) and communicating securely via OAuth 2.0, these extensions give your organisation full technical independence from proprietary vendor lock-in.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, absolutely. Digital Place is explicitly architected as a modular platform to support organisations at every stage of their digital journey, allowing you to start small and expand your capabilities as your strategy matures. The platform features more than 150 reusable components grouped into distinct, specialised packs, such as Core DXP, Low-Code Application Platforms (LCAP), CRM, and E-Commerce.
This structure gives you the complete freedom to subscribe only to the core functionality you need on day one, such as modernising your main corporate website or launching a specific citizen portal. As your operational workflows evolve or new budgets become available, you can instantly activate additional packs—like adding case management, customer service contact centers, or digital shops—without needing to rebuild your foundational infrastructure or disrupt existing live services.
SaaS stands for Software-as-a-Service, which means that Digital Place is fully hosted, managed, and delivered over the internet directly to your web browser. Instead of purchasing expensive server hardware, managing physical data centers, or executing complex, risky manual software upgrades, your organisation essentially rents a secure, cloud-native software environment. Placecube handles the end-to-end technical infrastructure, including server scaling, continuous database backups, performance optimisation, and regular security patching.
The commercial and practical benefits of this model are significant. Our SaaS subscription model features all-inclusive pricing with no hidden fees, meaning you will never face unexpected costs for high transaction volumes, growing visitor numbers, or community-led partnership projects. Furthermore, we manage the continuous deployment of new platform features and security patches directly into your User Acceptance Testing (UAT) environment first. This allows your internal teams to thoroughly preview and test updates with complete peace of mind before they are pushed live to your citizens.
Yes, completely. Placecube operates under the firm conviction that your data belongs entirely to you, and we openly commit to never charging a financial premium or integration fee to access your own software or digital services. Digital Place includes a full suite of Headless Delivery APIs that follow the global OpenAPI specification. This standard interface makes it remarkably straightforward for external software applications, reporting tools, and separate codebases to interact reliably and securely with your platform resources.
Every low-code data object your team builds within the platform automatically generates its own secure, endpoints right out-of-the-box. This allows for rapid, secure, two-way data synchronisation with external data warehouses or business intelligence applications, such as Microsoft PowerBI. All API communications are thoroughly locked down using industry-standard authentication frameworks like OAuth 2.0, ensuring that your data interactions remain completely secure, fully compliant, and available only to authorised endpoints.
While Digital Place contains specialised tools co-developed alongside local authorities, it is inherently built as a highly versatile, enterprise-grade digital experience platform suitable for any sector. The core capabilities of the platform—including advanced web content management, unified customer accounts, secure collaboration intranets, and visual low-code development—are universally valuable across numerous industries. It is an ideal fit for any complex organisation looking to consolidate a fragmented digital footprint onto a single managed platform.
Our existing client base and past project experience span Central Government, Local Government, Housing Associations, Healthcare Providers, and Policing. This demonstrates the platform’s widespread adaptability for any organisation that requires high security, open standards, and reliable digital engagement.
While Placecube is proudly rooted in the United Kingdom, our cloud-native SaaS architecture is fully equipped to support organisations globally. We fully recognise that data sovereignty, strict privacy controls, and local regulatory alignment are non-negotiable requirements for public sector and highly regulated entities. We operate under a "Privacy by Design" model, guaranteeing that sensitive regional personal data is always securely partitioned and handled in strict alignment with local data protection acts.
To achieve this, Digital Place is deployed within dedicated cloud environments utilising world-class Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure. While UK clients are automatically hosted in highly specified, secure UK-based data centers (the AWS London region), we configure and deploy international client environments within their respective local AWS geographic regions. This localised hosting approach ensures full compliance with local data residency laws while simultaneously delivering exceptionally low latency and high performance for your local citizens and staff.
Security is treated as a core foundational pillar across everything we do at Placecube. We adhere to exceptionally strict international security standards, operating exclusively within AWS data centers that maintain rigorous physical and environmental controls. Our corporate operations, development lifecycles, and cloud hosting environments are fully covered by independently audited ISO27001 certifications and Cyber Essentials Plus accreditations.
At the application level, your data is fiercely protected by robust platform features like Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and granular Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), ensuring staff only access information required for their jobs. We protect our infrastructure using enterprise-grade monitoring systems, run weekly automated vulnerability scans at both the web application and infrastructure layers, and undergo independent, comprehensive penetration testing at least annually by an accredited third-party security auditor.
Digital Place is built from the ground up to serve as the unifying "connective tissue" across your entire operational technology stack, removing legacy software silos entirely. Out-of-the-box, our Core platform features native integration cubes for a wide variety of standard enterprise tools, including Microsoft Active Directory for single sign-on, Microsoft SharePoint for document repositories, and advanced analytics platforms. It also includes an OpenAI connector to bridge cloud-based artificial intelligence directly into your publishing workflows.
Because the platform relies on open standards and OpenAPI-compliant REST frameworks, it can readily connect to virtually any modern or legacy third-party system that exposes an API. Whether you need to pass transactional information to an external financial ledger, feed customer records into an enterprise CRM like Microsoft Dynamics, or connect specialised geo-spatial mappings via ArcGIS, the platform handles data translation and secure communication smoothly.
For local authorities, Digital Place provides an extensive, battle-tested suite of accelerators and pre-configured integration connectors designed specifically to speed up digital delivery and eliminate duplicate development costs. The Local Gov DXP pack contains native connector cubes for dominant local government back-office systems across waste management, revenues and benefits, housing, and licensing—including Academy, IDOX Uniform, NEC M3/Assure, Bartec, Whitespace, and Echo.
Beyond back-office integrations, the pack features a massive library of ready-made forms and case type templates addressing common council use cases. With just a few clicks, councils can quickly deploy pre-designed public services like Blue Badge Applications, Bulky Waste Bookings, Council Tax Discount applications, Missed Bin Reporting, and Freedom of Information (FOI) case management. These accelerators strictly incorporate the GOV.UK Design System's front-end styles and components, ensuring your digital services are accessible, mobile-responsive, and WCAG 2.2 AA compliant by default.
Placecube is proud of its exceptional operational track record and consistently exceeds required industry standards for our clients. Our Software-as-a-Service architecture is completely engineered to be fully resilient with zero single points of failure throughout the underlying technology stack, allowing us to confidently commit to an availability SLA of at least 99.9% uptime. Any required, service-impacting infrastructure maintenance is strictly performed outside of standard UK business hours and communicated well in advance.
In the highly unlikely event of a critical cloud infrastructure disruption, our platform provides a 4-hour Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and an incredibly tight 15-minute Recovery Point Objective (RPO). This means services will be fully restored within 4 hours, with a maximum data-loss risk of no more than 15 minutes of transactional history. This high resilience is maintained through continuous, fully encrypted incremental database backups taken throughout the day and securely mirrored across multiple separate physical data centers.
Yes, we would welcome the opportunity to show you the platform in action.
When you request a demonstration, our product specialists will coordinate a tailored walkthrough session to show you both the intuitive administrative interfaces and the low-code building blocks that power the platform. We will show you how easily your teams can configure layout fragments, adapt multi-stage forms, and orchestrate case workflows using real-world public service examples.
Contact our team today to schedule your custom Digital Place demonstration.
Case studies
North Northamptonshire Council (NNC), a Digital Place subscriber, undertook a strategic project with Placecube to develop an end-to-end Blue Badge Application Management system. The council commissioned the solution to replace its aging Blue Badge system, which was scheduled for deprecation.
The Police Digital Service (PDS), in partnership with Placecube, created a knowledge sharing platform designed to facilitate collaboration within the policing sector. Police forces and their partners are enabled to share research, best practice and work together on projects.
Babergh and Mid Suffolk District Councils (B&MS) collaborated on a significant digital transformation initiative to rebuild and elevate the user experience of their critical housing services website.
Knowledge Hub (khub.net) is an open digital platform for public service collaboration and knowledge exchange. It provides free or low-cost spaces and tools to over 5,000 UK and international organisations across central and local government, health, education, housing, police, fire services, charities and many more.
Get in touch
Discuss the next step in your digital journey. Please get in touch today, our team of digital experts are ready to help.