My Alerts enables a member of public to sign up to a Local Authority alert service that automatically sends an email when any council related service event happens within a predefined distance from their house.

This could be a simple alert to a planning application for a property nearby, scheduled road works or seasonal changes in refuse collection. My Alerts keeps the public up to date with what is going on in their area whilst providing Councils with a simple and cost effective personalised communications channel to publish its service information. My Alerts works with any data available via the Data Share data delivery hub.

My House is part of iShareMaps Location Server. Simply put members of the public can enter their address and find out about services and information around their house. Examples of these are listed below:

• Electoral Details – who the Parish and Borough councillors are

• Local School Catchments Areas

• Planning Applications nearby

The central iShareMaps application enables Local Authorities to introduce a mapping interface to their public facing websites enabling citizens to find out about services quickly. The solution uses pure HTML so no browser plug-in is required. Once the iShareMaps module has been installed configuration is simply a matter of choosing the maps, defining the service data and deciding on the functionality required in the display.

Integration, so long the bugbear of organisations with multiple systems, is becoming easier and can mean huge cost savings for councils. Data Share, the optional module for iShareMaps can now integrate with ESRI CAPs/ArcSDE . The savings accrue from the fact that Councils do not have to pay additional software licenses for web delivery of their exsiting data. Data Share effectively sucks data out of the corporate data store and then caches it into a separate open source database for use by iShareMaps. Key applications remain completely unaffected and secure  because Data Store caches the data to another data store it provides a resilient solution for public facing applications especially services delivered to the public by Council websites.