Customer Solution Case Study
/ Project Automates Services in 14 Municipalities, Boosts Regional Knowledge Economy
Overview
Country or Region:Portugal
Industry:Public Sector
Customer Profile
Association of Municipalities of the District of Évora (AMDE) represents 14 Portuguese municipalities and is responsible for intermunicipal matters including regional development. Regional Development Agency of Alentejo (ADRAL) is composed of public and private entities working with all sectors of economic, social research, and development. The University of Évora provides technical expertise.
Business Situation
They needed to develop a regional knowledge-based economy and modernise local public administration, small and medium enterprises, and tourism organisations with faster and moreefficient service delivery.
Solution
Using products that are part of Microsoft® Windows Server System™, the Évora District Digital Project launched a district portal for municipal, tourism, and business services.
Benefits
Environment for local e-government
Retains municipalities’ autonomy
Ensures even level of public service
Web presence for local businesses
Knowledge transfer to region / “…[T]he City of Évora[had] solid business applications and workflow processes; it had almost everything it needed in the back office to start providing services over the Web.”
Teresa Batista, Operational Coordinator,Évora Digital District Project
The Association of Municipalities of the District of Évora (AMDE), in partnership with the Regional Development Agency of Alentejo, University of Évora, and Évora City Council, is leading the Évora Digital District Project to help the growth of the regional knowledge economy and to bring its 14 associate municipalities and tourism industry into the information age. A district portal was developed as an electronic front door to municipal, regional, business, and tourism services. The portal and supporting infrastructure are standardised on Microsoft® Windows Server System™products, with Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 used to publish and manage portal content. Web services are used to transfer data between the municipalities’ different back-office systems. An increasing number of municipal services are now going online, from building-permit applications to online discussion forums.
Situation
The Association of Municipalities of the District of Évora (AMDE), headquartered in the historical city of Évora, Portugal, is responsible for providing services to its 14 member local councils and undertaking common projects in areas such as education, social security, sport and culture, environmental protection, water management, infrastructure, and IT. One of the organisation’s key objectives is to develop a regional knowledge-based economy and information society by democratising access to information, making emerging technologies available to the population, and modernising local public administration with faster and moreefficient service delivery.
To this end, the Évora Digital District Project was launched in 2005 with 75 percent funding from the European Union (EU) and Portuguese government and 25 percent from the four project participants: AMDE as the project lead, together with the Regional Development Agency of Alentejo (ADRAL), the University of Évora, and Évora City Council. Also participating in the project are the other 13 municipalities (Alandroal, Arraiolos, Borba, Estremoz, Montemor-o-Novo, Mora, Mourão, Portel, Redondo, Reguengos, Vendas Novas, Viana do Alentejo, Vila Viçosa) and the Évora Tourism Region (RTE).
The City of Évora had earlier started its own digital city project under the same funding programme and that work was carried into the new regional project. For the 13 other municipalities, e-government and the information society had not been high priorities and any initiatives were limited in scale and lacked coordination. There were also large differences between the municipalities in their levels of back-office automation.
Teresa Batista, Operational Coordinator of the Évora Digital District Project, says, “At one end there was the City of Évora with solid business applications and workflow processes; it had almost everything it needed in the back office to start providing services over the Web. And then there were smaller municipalities which didn’t have any of the connections and applications required for the implementation of online services.”
Solution
The Évora Digital District Project aims to bring local government, businesses, and the region’s tourism industry into the information age. Underpinning the project is a district portal ( that acts as an electronic front door to municipal, tourism, and business services. Sitting under the main portal are individual Web sites of each of the 14 municipalities and regional subportals for regional promotion, business, and tourism.
“The regional portal is a big umbrella—it doesn’t live without the municipal, business, and tourism sites,” says Batista. “It gets all its content from other organisations and provides a way to direct users to everything that’s on the other sites.”
A municipal intranet was implemented with high-speed broadband connecting local council buildings within each municipality and each municipality to a regional data centre that provides central storage of all content used for the portal sites.
The portals and supporting infrastructure were built using the Microsoft® .NET Framework in partnership with Microsoft Portugal and Medidata Informatica, a Portuguese IT services company, and a team of computer and engineering students from the University of Évora.
The solution is standardised on Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software, running on the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system and supported by Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005. Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 enables the creation, publication, and management of content on the portal and Web sites while Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 is used for index and search capabilities. Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server gives each municipality its own e-mail server so all council employees can have their own e-mail address. Windows Server 2003, SQL Server 2005, Content Management Server 2002, SharePoint Portal Server 2003, and Exchange 2000 Server are all part of Microsoft Windows Server System integrated server software.
XML-based Web services—small building-block applications that can connect to each other as well as to other, larger applications over the Internet—are used for communication and data transfer between the municipalities’ different back-office systems.
“There are various technologies from three different suppliers being used in the back offices of the different municipalities, but they can now all speak the same language: XML,” says Rui Barroso, Project Consultant for the Évora Digital District Project. “We have clearly separated what’s the front end and what’s the back end. The front end interfaces through Web services to get its results from the back office.”
The Évora Digital District Project team worked individually with each municipality and their suppliers of back-office applications to develop their Web sites and make services available online. The City of Évora served as an example for the other communities because it was already at an advanced stage in its development.
“Évora has a development team in place with experience in developing online services on the Microsoft .NET platform,” says Barroso. “We were able to take this knowledge and present the Évora site as a prototype for the other municipal sites, and then go from there to establish a final site for each one.”
Benefits
Environmentfor Online Information and Services
The Évora Digital District Project gives the region’s municipalities, businesses, and tourism organisations the ability to provide information and services over the Internet. Common forms for all the municipalities were developed for online submissions and each municipal Web site comes with a basic set of functionalities such as security features, user registration, news and events, alerts, dynamic forums and polling, Weblogs, geographic information, regional directories, business opportunities, job applications, and more.
“We make all the functions available and each municipality chooses which ones they want to use,” says Batista. “It’s up to them to keep their Web sites and services up to date, which the Microsoft solution allows them to do easily.”
“Some of the smaller municipalities have never had a person designated for information management so we needed a platform that wasn’t difficult to use,” adds Barroso. “Content Management Server allows users to simply complete a form in a [Microsoft] Word document and publish it on the Web. They don’t need a lot of technical knowledge.”
Simplified management of Web sites lets the municipalities maintain their autonomy in service delivery and enables them to offer new dynamic content and services and receive citizen feedback through discussion forms and online surveys.
Ensuring Consistent Levels of Service
Throughout the Évora region, municipalities are now putting an increasing number of services online, from building-permit process applications to water bill payments. For citizens, local businesses, and tourists, this means easier and simpler access to these services.
“We want to have on the Internet all the same services that are currently available over the counter,” says Batista. “In the smaller municipalities, the online interactions might not be so numerous but it is an important principle to ensure that every citizen has access to the same level of public service across the region. Services provided by small municipalities must be of the same quality as those provided by the larger municipalities.”
“A problem for small municipalities is that their back-office processes are often complicated and time consuming,” adds Barroso. “Through the project we’re able to reduce the time it takes to respond to citizen requests, and do it in a more transparent way.”
Developing the Local Knowledge Economy
Besides bringing efficiency to local government service delivery, the Évora Digital District Project helps to boost the region’s economic prospects and lays the foundation for a knowledge-based information society. Tourism is being promoted at the regional level, with visitors having the ability to plan local trips and make reservations online. Local businesses have a Web presence to promote their services and conduct e-commerce, and they can network to develop their businesses and attract inward investment.
Further promoting the local economy, the municipal intranet is set up to support e-procurement with online catalogues, auctions, and electronic tendering. For purchases valued at less than 5,000 euros, municipal staff can order through a directory of preapproved suppliers—all of which are companies based in the region.
The University of Évora’s role in the Évora Digital District project ensures technical knowledge remains in the region. The involvement of Microsoft has helped the project to connect with local software developers.
“Microsoft gave us the confidence that the Évora Digital District Project would be a success,” says Barroso. “When comparing proposals for the project, Microsoft’s was much more well structured and well defined.”
Batista concludes, “We want suppliers like Microsoft who will invest in the region and transfer knowledge so that we can evolve the project with our own competencies and human resources, creating dynamics with either the university team or local companies.”
Microsoft Windows Server System
Microsoft Windows Server System is a comprehensive, integrated, and interoperable server infrastructure that helps reduce the complexity and costs of building, deploying, connecting, and operating agile business solutions. Windows Server System helps customers create new value for their business through the strategic use of their IT assets. With the Windows Server operating system as its foundation, Windows Server System delivers dependable infrastructure for data management and analysis; enterprise integration; customer, partner, and employee portals; business process automation; communications and collaboration; and core IT operations including security, deployment, and systems management.
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