Tuesday 6 January 2009
The Big Oxford Computer Co. Ltd.

UnionReps Google Maps Mash-up Case Study - Trade Unions Congress

Overview

The Trade Unions Congress (TUC) is the voice of Britain at work. With 58 affiliated unions representing nearly seven million working people from all walks of life, they campaign for a fair deal at work and for social justice at home and abroad.

TUC UnionReps is a secure web portal specifically aimed at TUC union representatives across the UK.

https://www.unionreps.org.uk/

Objectives

The TUC are continually improving communication channels for their representatives, as well as keeping up-to-date with the latest Web 2.0 technologies for the Extranet site. They wanted to introduce an application mash-up with existing union reps data and Google Maps. 

Solution

Based upon the geographical location of the Union Rep (defined by their own user profile), users are able to find other Union Reps or Groups in their area and link through to their profile page for contact details and related discussion forum postings.

BOCC employed the following standard architecture of for the UnionReps web application mash-up:

  • The content provider: the source of the data. Data is made available using the Google API and the Web Service protocol;
  • The mash-up site: the web application which provides the new service using different data sources that are not owned by it - i.e. UnionReps utilising Google Maps;
  • The web browser: the user interface of the mash-up. For UnionReps the content is mashed by the client web browsers using client side web language, in this example JavaScript. 

Technologies

The system utilises:

  • BOCC CMS (content management system)
  • Microsoft™ SQL Server 2005
  • Adobe® ColdFusion®
  • AJAX
  • Web services using an API
  • Hosting on fully managed dedicated web servers at BOCC
  • SSL (Secure Server Certificate)
  • Extensible HyperText Markup Language 1.0
  • Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 2.0 compliant