Herefordshire Partnership

Ixxus has been awarded a major contract to design and build an online community portal for the Herefordshire Partnership, lead by Herefordshire Council, utlising both an enterprise search technology and an enterprise content management technology. It will aggregate content from all the public sector agencies across the county to give the public a single access point.

Herefordshire Council is the lead agency on the portal project, which operates under the Herefordshire Partnership's Herefordshire In Touch e-Gateway programme of work. It is partly paid for through the European Regional Development Fund and Single Regeneration Budget funding to promote Partnership activity.

The portal will provide a gateway to a variety of partners such as the local NHS trust, Advantage West Midlands, Learning Skills Council, Voluntary Sector Assembly, West Mercia Constabulary, Chambers of Commerce, Business Link and more. For example, parents will be able to check out children's events or emergency numbers; while a visitor to the area could find a B&B, places to visit; and a local entrepreneur could research what help is available to grow his or her business. In addition, seasonal workers will be able to find out more information about living and working in Hereford in five different languages, including English, Portuguese, Russian, Lithuanian and Polish.

All the partners and associated groups will continue to have their own web presence containing vast amounts of information that visitors can get to via the HP portal. Ixxus will customise the sophisticated search technology and content management solution needed to deliver a content-rich site that requires significant editorial and content management input. Because the data is geographically dispersed and of varied quality, structure and type, an enterprise search software will be used for data mining and aggregation.

As well as having multiple language versions the portal will be fully compliant with current AAA accessibility requirements.

Julie Holmes - Head of Information, Technology & Customer Services, at Herefordshire Council - comments, "This project is a key enabler in our strategy to deliver innovation successfully and cost effectively. In this case the aims of the project are to improve access to services for the residents, businesses, community and visitors to Herefordshire by delivering customer-focused and accessible online media which will be available from home, the office, or via one of our Community Access Points." Herefordshire Council has very progressive ideas on information management and we believe that this multi-lingual portal will not only provide an essential service to citizen's, visitors, partners, community groups and business, but will also give other councils inspiration to develop their own versions.