Background

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.

Our brief

The TUC wanted to integrate a cohesive and intuitive search mechanism to enable users to search across the family of TUC sites using a familiar search interface. BOCC suggested that Google Mini be implemented in order to achieve this.

Our solution

Initially BOCC set up Google Mini as a trial, crawling various TUC websites. The trial Google Mini Appliance was running on ‘default’ mode to allow the TUC to review the quality of the results returned. The trial went well and the TUC decided to implement a customised version of the Google mini into their sites.

BOCC procured the Google mini appliance on behalf of the TUC and it was agreed that the maximum 100,000 document crawling licence would be adequate for the TUC sites. The appliance was configured to carry out a continuous crawl of the websites. Authorised administrators at the TUC have access to the administration interface in order to update this configuration and also run search reports and view access logs.

The Google mini provides a reasonable level of customisation and configurability. BOCC configured the existing quick search on the home page and amended the default search all of the TUC websites.

TUC provided a list of URL’s to BOCC, which were to be included in the search.

The existing advanced search was extended to allow users to select which of the TUC sites they would like to search and also to replicate as much as possible of the existing advanced search functionality.

The search results page were customised to fit into the existing site design. A ‘Powered by Google’ icon is shown on the foot of the search results pages. Any embargoed content from the CMS is not returned within search results until the content is active on the public site.

Extranet content is searchable from within each Extranet. A separate collection was set up with appropriate security for each one.

Technologies

The system utilises:

• Microsoft™ SQL Server 2005
• Adobe® ColdFusion®
• Replication of data, which then integrates with TUC back-office systems
• Secure replication of data to and from internal systems via a virtual private network (VPN)
• 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