ISYS Search Software and Blue Mountains City Council

The Blue Mountains City Council is situated approximately 100km west of Sydney and serves a population of around 74,000. Using ISYS:web for their intranet and Internet site, the Council has also implemented ISYS:spider to add quality external information to the intranet, creating a Council information portal.

Using ISYS:web, the council has established an Internet site, comprising information for the community and minutes of Council meetings, meeting agendas, business planning and policy information, service information, a library site and media center. Most of the data on the Internet site is kept in its original file format and ISYS:web provides dynamic HTML conversion and hit highlighting at the time of serving the relevant document to the browser.

The Council has also used ISYS:web to create an intranet site for a wide variety of information including community directories, policies and plans, forms and positions vacant. Each department has its own web content manager who is responsible for their department's web and intranet content. The web content managers maintain content through the site's Administration Center software, thus avoiding the need for Council to employ a full-time web administrator.

Using ISYS:spider, the Council has created an information portal for its intranet. ISYS:spider adds the ability to be selective about knowledge acquired from the Internet so the portal incorporates external information that is relevant to council staff. ISYS:spider seamlessly integrates nominated external websites into the single stream of information accessed via ISYS:web, providing searchable, useful web access complete with hit highlighting and hit-to-hit navigation.

The Council has selected several important sites to access via their intranet, including a range of local government associations and organizations. The staff at Blue Mountains City Council regularly access the information available from these external sites. ISYS:spider adds search functionality to these sites as well as the advantage of instantaneous multiple site searches, providing a single resource that saves time and generates comprehensive results.

"The ISYS portal is a quick, easy-to-maintain system that provides seamless access to a range of Internet information which improves the Council's efficiency in accessing up-to-date information," said Paul Hamilton, Applications Analyst at the Council.