Hello and Happy Holidays!

As many of you may already know, the SitesWI database will be shut down in the near future. Read about this plus new developments regarding the realtor component.

On November 14, users of our old database system were notified that SitesWI was going to be shut down on December 1st. A grace period of one month has been established. After December 31st, SitesWI will no longer be viewable to the public or to users of the system. The domain name will remain active for one year and will direct users to the new LOIS system. This will give visitors a chance to reset their bookmarks to LOIS.

After working with economic development organizations to garner approvals for realtors to participate and support their efforts, LOIS has decided that it is in everyone's best interest to put Forward Wisconsin in charge of registering realtors. This will create the need for Sharon to obtain appropriate approvals from economic developers such as yourself to allow realtors to add buildings and sites to each of your profiles.

Any realtor/broker firm that supports an economic development organization will not be charged for this service. LOIS will charge realtor/broker groups that do not support at least one economic development organization. For example, there may be realtor/broker groups who could potentially be using this tool and not sharing their site and building information with any economic development organization.

From this point on, economic developers such as yourself, will not be required to assist realtors in the registration process. Please direct all inquiries to Sharon. The registration form that had been previously published on LocationOne is going away.

This is how we envision the new process:

1) A realtor or economic development organization contacts Forward Wisconsin requesting the realtor service.
2) Sharon evaluates the request and gets in contact with the appropriate economic development organizations affected by the request.
3) After getting approvals from the ED organization (s) responsible for the sites and building data, Sharon will complete the online request form.
4) LocationOne will create the realtors profile.
5) LocationOne will send an introduction packet along with a username and password to realtor/broker.
6) Sharon will be notified when the introduction packet has been sent to the realtor.
7) A realtor will login in, enter data and click on submit. Economic developers who have the same localities in their profile will then approve the listings and send them to the live site. Listings will then roll up into Forward's view.

Please contact Sharon at 608-261-2501 if you have any comments or questions about this new process.

On November 9, LOIS announced the completion of the following enhancements.

• A user can now copy a building or site record link from within the Administration site and paste it into any page or e-mail program.
• A delete function was added to the XML feature in the realtor component. This will allow realtors/brokers to delete listings via the XML process.
• The building/site search pages have been updated to exclude counties where the building/site hide flag is turned on.
• The Building tab has been set to display even though there may not be any building records to display.
• The Voltage and Amps labels in the Building/Utility Section have been fixed.
• The County Description field was added to the presentation site on the overview page.
• A correction was made to the building flyer to prevent it from printing off the page.
• The labels in the Locality Business Growth Status administration section have been enhanced.

• Image Upload Feature - By the end of December 2005
• Print multiple records into one PDF flyer (Shopping Cart) - By the end of December 2005
• XML for State, County and Metro sections - By 1st quarter 2006
• Modify Date Filter in User Settings - By 1st Quarter 2006

Each month, we list communities that have set up links to LOIS on their Web site. See links in lower lefthand corner. To have your community link added to our list of Featured LOIS Sites, please contact Sharon Seffrood. See contact information below.