REDMOND, Washington, April 23 /PRNewswire/ --

- Citizen Service Platform enables Microsoft and partners to provide
governments with tools focused on efficiency and responsiveness.

The Citizen Service Platform (CSP) now is available to customers along
with free templates to help customers implement technological solutions to
some of the most common issues governments face. The CSP application
framework, announced by Microsoft Corp in January 2008, is designed to help
governments of all sizes more responsively deliver services to citizens via
the internet, which facilitates easier interaction with citizens, streamlines
processes and, as a result, saves time and taxpayer dollars.

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The CSP, a culmination of Microsoft's partnerships, programmes and 
projects conducted with governments over several years, was developed based 
on challenges faced by diverse government offices and different regions 
worldwide.

From London to Porto, Portugal, to all the municipalities of Denmark,
governments of all sizes are using technology to interact with citizens in a
variety of new and innovative ways. Microsoft has developed an applications
framework upon which partners can build solutions that address specific
government needs, including technical guidance regarding implementation and
customisation for use by both partners and customers. To date, more than 90
partners have signed up to build solutions on the CSP.

"The need for a platform like the CSP is clearly demonstrated by the
response we've received from our partners," said Ralph Young, vice president
for the Worldwide Public Sector at Microsoft. "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."

In Porto this week, the Local and Regional Government Solutions Forum 
will bring together almost 300 partners and customers to discuss the 
management challenges governments face and technology's role in solving 
these issues. Some already have experienced how the CSP, in combination 
with a tailored partner solution, can increase efficiency, decrease costs 
and bring constituents and government closer together. Others will be coming 
to view firsthand how they can make further use of their existing technology
investments by using them as part of the CSP rather than starting from
scratch.

"E-government initiatives can be difficult to implement as resistance is
generally high due to legacy and integration issues," said A Kaare Norgaard,
CEO of Resultmaker A/S, the CSP partner on the implementation of Denmark's
sickness reimbursement programme. "However, now the system is appreciated as
the best example of e-government in practise, which simply demonstrates how
installing a platform where parts already exist is half the battle, as is
often the case with the CSP."

Free Templates Allow Partners and Customers to Customise In-House CSP
availability includes templates available for existing customers to download
at no cost, bolstering their ability to do more with existing technology
investments. The eight new templates that focus on common government pain
points are these:

-- E-Councilor template. Live Agent that allows messenger communication
       with a virtual government worker to ask questions
    -- Web TV template. Allows government and citizen video hosting in Web
       2.0 style
    -- Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 templates. Set of 40 templates to
       customise scenarios that address both site and system administration 
       needs
    -- Local government communications template. Sample portal with intranet
       and extranet templates
    -- Role-based My Site template. Designed for Microsoft Office SharePoint
       Server 2007 and the My Site functionality
    -- Agenda Management template. Allows organisations to streamline
       processes
    -- Electronic form templates. InfoPath form templates addressing areas
       from building permitting to tax declaration
    -- Microsoft Dynamics CRM templates for municipal governments. Vertical
       templates including reference data models, pre-defined work flows and
       role-based user experiences



With the templates, governments are able to apply them to their own CSP
configurations, and customise them to further close the gap between citizen
expectations and their own delivery of services. According to research
conducted on behalf of Microsoft by Capgemini in 2007, features such as
citizen portals, case management, intelligent forms, community web sites and
document management emerged as strong priorities for governments to focus
their IT spending on; all are represented in the free template offerings.

CSP and Partner Solutions at Work

Availability of the CSP allows other cities to experience what London,
Porto and the municipalities of Denmark already have:

-- The Square Mile. The City of London Corp provides local government,
       policing and other services for the financial and commercial heart of
       Britain, the Square Mile. The area houses 320,000 workers a day in a 
       region that produces 2 per cent of the UK's GDP. The city worked with 
       CSP partner TeamKnowledge to introduce a contact centre built upon 
       Microsoft Dynamics CRM that provides a single point of entry for 
       incoming citizen inquiries, from parking violations to building 
       permits. Results from January 2007 to January 2008 were as follows:

       -- Call volume went from 130,000 to various departments to just over
          50,000 calls answered at the consolidated Contact Centre.
       -- Eighty-three per cent of calls were answered within 20 seconds.
       -- Sixty-five per cent of calls were resolved at the first point
          of contact (ie, not passed on to a specialist).

    -- Connecting local and central government. Danish governments are
       successfully running the digital sickness reimbursement solution with 
       partner Resultmaker, which allows Danish citizens absent due to 
       illness (as well as for maternity or paternity leave) to be paid by 
       employers, employers to remit that salary to the local government,
       and the local government to be reimbursed by the central government.
       The Resultmaker solution works atop Microsoft Office SharePoint
       Server and integrates a number of central government agencies with
       all of the Danish municipalities. Results to date include the
       following:

       -- An estimated 69 million euros in savings for the municipalities
          of Denmark (4,000 transactions per day at 75 euros per
          transaction to process, or 300,000 euros per day in direct
          administrative cost reduction, based on 230 working days per
          year).
       -- Daily transactions with errors have been reduced from a range
          of 50 per cent to 75 per cent down to zero.
       -- Time gained by the municipality, as municipal employees now
          have extra time to work on other healthcare-related tasks such
          as preventive care that will save additional costs by
          preventing further sickness reimbursement.

    -- Saving more than time and money. The city council in Porto, the
       second-largest in Portugal, needed an efficient solution to
       internally manage city council meetings, which generate hundreds of
       thousands of pages of documents each year. The Executive Portal
       project, a portion of the CSP offering based on Microsoft SharePoint
       Portal 2007 technologies, computerised all the documentation needed
       for city council meetings, and streamlined the entire preparation
       process.

       -- Reduction in paper equivalent to 11 trees per year
       -- Simplification and streamlining of city council meeting
          logistics and bureaucracy
       -- Integration with Porto's city council document management
          system
       -- Future scalability of the solution based on existing
          functionality deployed by the platform



More information on CSP, as well as further case studies, purchasing
information, and details on how to locate local partners, can be found at
http://www.microsoft.com/industry/publicsector/government/csp.mspx.

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