Microsoft offers governments sharing tools

As part of its ongoing efforts to woo public sector customers, Microsoft Corp. has begun giving governments tools for collaborating and sharing technology information with other organizations so that they can learn from each other’s experiences and cut development costs.

Under a program titled the Solutions Sharing Network, Microsoft is helping provide public sector clients with a community-based portal for sharing best practices, application source codes, and other development information, it said Tuesday.

The Redmond, Washington, software maker is providing interested public sector customers with the tools for free, but the client organizations are in charge of the content, maintenance and procuring of any necessary hardware, Microsoft said. The software maker has been working on the idea for the past 18 months and done several pilots, but is now opening the door to all interested parties, offering applications developed with partner Kanalytics Inc., said Pete Hayes, vice president of the public sector for Microsoft in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

Hayes said the idea for the network had its genesis in a conversation he had with a government customer in South Africa who had an application he wanted to share and provide to other countries. Hayes began talking to other government leaders and found that they were very interested in the idea of sharing.

“We thought maybe we could provide a technology solution on top of a solution that many customers already had in the works, so we tried it,” Hayes said.

The Solutions Sharing Network works on top of Microsoft’s SharePoint Portal Server software. It provides users with a sort of community forum where they can post ideas, code, white papers and screen shots and share them with organizations that have common technology needs.

For instance, London’s Borough of Newham and the Local Authority Software Consortium are collaborating with Belfast City to help implement a CRM (customer relationship management) system in over a dozen local authorities across the U.K., Microsoft said.

While the Solutions Sharing Network offers a free exchange of technology ideas and knowledge, Hayes said that the model was not intended to try to compete with open source rivals.

“I see this as a way for Microsoft to do a better job at listening to what customers want and responding,” Hayes said.

Hayes said that Microsoft designed the tools to help public sector organizations but he did not rule out the possibility that they could be commercialized and offered to enterprises as a way of collaborating on common technology needs. Although he said that Microsoft has not made plans to commercialize the tools, he said that Kanalytics, in Annapolis, Maryland, may chose to sell them to businesses, and Microsoft would still be involved.

“We would be a partner to Kanalytics the same way we are partners in the public sector today,” Hayes said.

David Rowe, Microsoft’s government program manager in EMEA, said that the tools are definitely headed in the direction of commercialization. They are already available in nine languages and a second version of the applications is in the pipeline, he said.

Since the content of the portal is run and hosted by the client, there are no limits to what technology information they can share. If the tools do enter the enterprise market, they could potentially change the way that business collaborate on technology questions, allowing companies in vertical markets to more easily replicate each other’s systems, for instance.

For now, however, Microsoft is aiming the tools squarely at government customers who it says are under considerable pressure to improve organizational efficiency under tight budgets. Government customers who already have SharePoint can download the tools and play around with them if they chose, or contact Microsoft for installation, Rowe said.