November 15, 2011 -- With more and more councils now shifting their costly face to face and phone transactions online, Herefordshire Council announces it has chosen Dotted Eyes’ web mapping solution to enable residents to instantly visualise planning applications in their area, replacing legacy technology.

Residents within Herefordshire will soon be able to use the council’s website to easily pinpoint the locations and details of both live as well as historic planning applications on an online map. This will help free up the resource required for dealing with these queries, enabling them to work on more things, whilst improving the service Herefordshire council provides to its residents.

Herefordshire will be implementing the recently launched web mapping application, Local Government Portal by Dotted Eyes, one of the UK’s leading GIS development houses. Local Government Portal is specifically designed for the needs of councils and for this reason it was identified as the perfect choicefor Herefordshire’s requirements.

The council’s key requirements included the need to integrate with in-house software such as CRM, EDRMS and planning systems, be cost effective and deliver a refined user experience across the Herefordshire Public Service and its partner organisations.

Built on top of a single, open source technology stack, Local Government Portal provides the flexibility the council needs to accommodate future change whilst significantly reducing the cost of multiple desktop licences.  The public facing planning application is the first in a series of modules to be delivered by Dotted Eyes for Herefordshire.

Duncan Trumper, GIS Team Leader for Hoople Ltd (formerly The Shared Services Partnership), Herefordshire said: “With the drive from central government to cut costs in local authorities, Local Government Portal could not have come at a better time, as it provides us with an affordable and user-friendly solution for driving our channel shift from phone to web.”

Duncan added: “The fact that Local Government Portal was based on Open Source technology was also seen as very desirable simply because it fits with our drive to reduce costs. In addition, the managed, secure environment it provides will help in pre-empting the requirements from the INSPIRE directive.”

Ben Allan, Managing Director of Dotted Eyes commented: “Our new Local Government Portal is proving to be hugely popular with councils because it specifically addresses their web mapping needs.  Using Open Source software in our development means that we can offer Herefordshire Council a simple, flexible and most importantly, in today’s climate, affordable tool that integrates into a number of functions across their shared service.”