London Borough of Waltham Forest

The London Borough of Waltham Forest is situated in the north of London, with a population of approximately 221,000 people. The council recently implemented the ISYS:web search engine on their website to facilitate website visitors finding their way through over 2000 pages of Council and community information.

When looking at new search engines for Waltham Forest's website, the most important feature for webmaster Adrian Pietryga was flexibility and the ability to perform text searches within SQL databases.

The Waltham Forest website serves up over 2000 pages to its community. "We have a whole range of diverse information on the site," said Pietryga. "There are council minutes, council forms, information about environmental and planning issues as well as a whole database of Community Resources." With 24,000 hits per day, the site is very active and Pietryga credits a lot of the attraction to the Community information they supply to the public. The Waltham Forest site doesn't just inform its residents about what the council is doing but offers information ranging from childcare and housing to education and tourism, as well as information about social clubs and recreational activities in the area. The Waltham Forest site also hosts the William Morris Gallery. William Morris was a famous designer, painter and philosopher who lived in the area in the late 19th Century. People from all over the world visit the Waltham Forest site for information on William Morris.

The council has had a website for around five years but has only recently implemented ISYS:web. Prior to using the ISYS search engine, Waltham Forest used the Microsoft Index Server that ships for free with the NT Server. "Index Server was not very flexible and couldn't provide full text search on SQL databases," said Pietryga. "We have a lot of information stored in databases and I wanted something that would allow us to get the best possible results from this information."

ISYS:web also offers dynamic HTML conversion and hit highlighting. Many of Waltham Forest's documents are in non-HTML format, and include mostly Word documents and PDFs. The council is able to maintain a lot of its website via the original authors. Because of ISYS:web's dynamic HTML conversion, Word and PDF documents are maintained by the person originally responsible for that information, avoiding document duplication and ensuring that the website is always up-to-date. ISYS:web updates its records every night, incorporating any new changes from the day.

This feature also makes upkeep of the database an easier task. As the database is updated or added to, the information becomes available on the website the next day. There is no need to convert the database files to HTML first. ISYS:web administrators can also create templates to view the database information. This Rich SQL feature gives the administrator complete control over the way information is presented and the fields that are displayed. Because ISYS:web performs a search on a field or on the text within each field, search results yield more accurate results than the usual database fielded-query system.

"ISYS:web was easy to implement and maintenance requires minimal effort. Because it requires no plug-ins to view documents such as PDF, it minimizes bandwidth and, in the UK, that's really important. ISYS means we serve up our information as quickly as possible," said Pietryga.