Microsoft's E-Government Platform Available Worldwide
Starting with April 23, 2008, Microsoft's e-government platform has been made available to customers around the world. The Citizen Service Platform, announced initially at the start of 2008, is designed to streamline the interaction between citizens and governmental organizations by enabling the delivery of traditional services over the Internet. In Microsoft's perspective, CSP will streamline scenarios involving the interaction between governments and citizens, by simplifying the process and delivering a reduction in the associated costs.
"The need for a platform like the CSP is clearly demonstrated by the response we’ve received from our partners. A common framework to build from allows partners to tailor their solutions to specific government needs and, after working with governments for the past several years on early versions of the CSP, it’s exciting to watch this community effort really start to pay dividends to both citizens and the governments that serve them," revealed Ralph Young, vice president for the Worldwide Public Sector at Microsoft.
The Citizen Service Platform act as an application framework, and it is even distributed with free templates set up to enable customer deployments of solutions created to address specific government issues. In this manner, the platform can be adapted to various markets around the world, with Microsoft placing a great deal of focus on client-side configuration and customization capabilities. The Redmond company is offering a total of eight free templates for download with the CSP. E-Councilor, Web TV template, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 templates, Local government communications template, Role-based My Site, Agenda Management template, Electronic form templates and the Microsoft Dynamics CRM templates for municipal governments are all the items available.
"E-government initiatives can be difficult to implement as resistance is generally high due to legacy and integration issues," said A. Kaare Nørgaard, CEO of Resultmaker A/S, the CSP partner on the implementation of Denmark’s sickness reimbursement program. "However, now the system is appreciated as the best example of e-government in practice, which simply demonstrates how installing a platform where parts already exist is half the battle, as is often the case with the CSP."
Source: news.softpedia.com
