University of Central Lancashire benefits from Exalead's CloudView Search

Exalead, a global provider of search-based business application (SBA) technology, today announced that University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) has deployed its CloudView Search solution. The platform provides core search capabilities for both the University's website and intranet to cater to the needs of staff, tutors and visitors.

"We wanted to provide a service that replicated familiar web search tools and was easy and intuitive to use," explained Dominic Hurst, Web Services Manager, Learning and Information Services, UCLan. "Our previous solution was clumsy and returned very poor results, with no user control to drill down into them. Therefore, we looked to adopt a ‘best of breed' product to provide the ultimate web experience for our staff and current and future students. Exalead's CloudView Search solution met all our requirements."

Exalead's CloudView Search is an easy-to-use platform for creating search-based applications that access both structured and unstructured data such as instant messages, emails, web pages, and multimedia. With its innovative architecture, the CloudView platform provides core search solutions, which are feature rich and extremely easy to implement, providing a perfect combination of reduced administration costs and a better search experience for customers.

The deployment of CloudView is part of UCLan's ambitious web strategy to be a leader in the university sector for web provision. It is one of the largest universities in the UK with more than 32,000 students, 500 undergraduate courses and 180 postgraduate courses. It employs 3,000 people, has a turnover of £120m a year and contributes £300m to the regional economy.

With over 180,000 unique visits a month to its website, the University needed a robust and intuitive search solution to provide accurate and categorised results, that were returned quickly and provided the ability to drill down and search within results.

"The new search solution now brings back the results expected, rather than something at random," concluded Hurst. "CloudView's user interface and multiple options for refining search also make it a real business asset. It is extremely good value for money and we are very pleased, not only with the product, but also the speed of deployment."

"We're providing University of Central Lancashire with search capabilities across every one of its core business areas, and have answered its requirements for flexibility, powerful search and ease of use," explained Exalead's UK Managing Director, Raymond Bentinck. "We've provided staff and students with a superior search capability, at a substantially lower total cost than our competitors. As UCLan grows and develops, the Exalead solution will be able to expand with it to incorporate new data and new systems."