UddannelsesGuiden

At www.ug.dk, a large portal can be found – developed together with Schultz Information – for the Danish Ministry of Education (Undervisningsministeriet). This portal was initially under tender in 2003, where Schultz Information won the contract, with Kraks Forlag (Kraks Publishing), Alpha Solutions, and Userminds as sub-contractors.

Sitecore and FAST

This solution was established on a Sitecore CMS version 4 platform, as at the time (2004) this was one of the most flexible frameworks for the development of information-rich web-portals. Sitecore technology was integrated with a FAST search engine. The solution was commissioned as of 1 August 2004, on the planned date. In 2008 this portal was again put to tender – and Schultz Information with Alpha Solutions and Userminds as sub-contractors again won the contract. The project was once again completed within the allocated timeframe as of 1 August 2009. Technologically, the platform was upgraded to Sitecore version 6 – and the search engine behind the solution was upgraded to the latest FAST 5.3.

In both tenders, Alpha Solutions was responsible for the entire technical implementation of both the Sitecore and FAST platforms. The content in the solution is highly integrated with Schultz Information’s editorial tools, and content is imported, integrated and published via Sitecore to other systems.
In the solutions, Userminds was responsible for quality assurance of the information architecture and for usability – and has performed a range of user tests of the solution in the course of the implementation.

External

Besides the editorially controlled content from Schultz Information, there are also a number of externally maintained areas for, for example, the study selection centre (studievalgscenter). In this solution, these are established as editorial areas, controlled with rights in a central Sitecore CMS solution. The editors use Pageedit (inline, context sensitive editing while viewing the portal’s content) for maintaining both article information and other directly visible information, but also menu structures and non-visible metadata is maintained without needing to view Sitecore’s editorial backend systems.

Search

The solution is to a large degree driven by FAST’s advanced search engine. This is used to enable targeting information to various user groups, as the new education guide has focus on both the educational requirements of the young and the old. The targeted grouping is therefore important to give users exactly the content they are searching for.

Searching in this solution has incredibly many facets. Firstly, there is of course a traditional free-text search. Associated with this is highlighting of searched words, spelling help, word variance/conjugations/declensions, as well as facetted searches where documents within specific categories in a complex category hierarchy can be chosen.

This type of search is based on a general classification of the documents found on the portal. The classification used in free-text searching on the portal is not more demanding than that all the externally maintained areas also have documents which can be found in the same way in free-text search with the “official” education and job texts.

Besides this free-text search, are a number of niche oriented searches, where there is focus on either special user interaction or finding specific types of documents.  An example of this is Guide to jobs. Here, the user has to enter his/her responses to various parameters and personal preferences for a job by considering the degree to which a job should be theoretical for example. This gives a dynamic update to the list of jobs which match these criteria. This search is made with much more specialised metadata tagging – but it is the same technical search facility which supports this. This also means that we can combine all these different search metaphors.