London Borough of Hillingdon Customer Case Study Featured Customer: London Borough of Hillingdon In common with many other Local Governments the London Borough of Hillingdon has a very active web site taking upwards of 3.5 million hits per month and serving between 1-2 million pages per month. The Council actively supports the national campaign to encourage use of online services and can boast a comprehensive and busy web site that is available 24 hours a day 7 days per week as a service to its customers, providing a valuable and essential method of communication in key areas of the councils activities. Together with access to key services the Council took the decision to publish summary web site usage statistics on the utilisation of its web site for all web visitors to see. The challenge was therefore to find a product that would create highly detailed reports for internal use and analysis, while at the same time allowing overview reports for external visitors to be embedded on their web site, but without a ‘user’ interface. Nathan Hyder, Web Development Manager for Hillingdon Borough Council was tasked with finding the right tool for the job. Nathan had prior experience of several other products in this area but had found problems with all of them, typically in the areas of processing speed, flexibility, or data extraction into user pages etc., and not least of all the availability and quality of local support to help him through the learning curve. Nathan had to find the right technical solution coupled with the right customer service solution to meet the Council’s need, and to find it relatively quickly. Nathan turned to Sawmill because of its good browser based interface, its powerful command line interface, overall speed of processing, and its rich feature set, and of course its local support. Sawmill proved ideal for their internal analysis and presentation needs, however extracting data into a web page for public consumption required knowledge of the Sawmill command line interface, something Nathan did not have, but help was on hand., A call to the Sawmill Support Desk solved his problems and didn’t cost him a penny. Following a short exchange of emails to define their precise requirements the Sawmill engineers were able to advise how he could include ‘data only’ into his web site on a regular scheduled basis providing web usage statistics to the public. Nathan commented: “Support from Sawmill UK Limited was great, we exchanged emails to define what I needed and they came back right away with solutions. All of the solutions were already part of the Sawmill toolset so it was a short learning curve for me. Thanks to Sawmill’s local support this was quick and painless solution.” Customer Case Study continued: London Borough of Hillingdon To implement all of their requirements Hillingdon purchased a 10 profile license of Sawmill Professional Edition and hosted the copy on a Linux system. Total Cost of Ownership for the council is very low due to two principle factors i) the low initial cost of the Sawmill license, and ii) the excellent local support available from Sawmill UK. The Hillingdon web site may be viewed at: http://www.hillingdon.gov.uk The Hillingdon online statistics page may be viewed at http://www.hillingdon.gov.uk/site_map/stats/index.php Nathan Hyder, Hillingdon Borough Web Development Manager may be contacted at: NHyder@Hillingdon.Gov.UK Notes on Sawmill Sawmill is available is three versions: Sawmill Lite, Sawmill Professional and Sawmill Enterprise. All versions contain the fast and efficient Sawmill database allowing ‘live data’ reporting and dynamic filtering of both log files and reports. All versions feature the same modern user interface with full browser support, multi-processor support (Enterprise), SQL support (Enterprise) and flexible licensing options starting from a single profile. Every version of Sawmill supports all 600+ format types.. Licensing is single copy, with each copy capable of analysing a theoretically unlimited number of target servers (analysis hardware and network permitting). No limit is placed on the number of ‘users’ and additional licenses are NOT required for identical clusters of servers. Profiles may be added to an existing license easily and simply without financial penalty