Overview

Government is concerned about protecting citizens from threats to their health and safety and improving emergency preparedness. This inter-jurisdictional service delivery imperative spans a wide variety of stakeholders across a wide range of communities.

As a result, all levels of Government and organizations across the public and private sectors need to establish and maintain communication throughout the community in a trustworthy environment. Recent world events have demonstrated that a collaborative approach to crisis and emergency management provides a more effective means to responding to critical events.

These Government and emergency management agencies handle a wide variety of data, ranging from criminal arrest reports to sensitive and highly classified intelligence to weather or geospatial imagery. Knowledge gained through careful analysis, organization and dissemination of this information can protect citizens and help avert disaster. Governments with strong collaborative processes can realize a range of important benefits:

• Spontaneous collaboration tools provide first responders with trusted information sharing environments to more effectively coordinate and respond to crisis events.



• Microsoft's collaboration and unified communications solutions for both high and constrained
  
  Bandwidth environments provide highly assured operations through our industry-leading security development practices as well as platform security certifications.



• Together with global and local partners, Microsoft provides connected and interoperable solutions supporting command and control, logistics, personnel management, disaster relief and emergency response services.

Emergency Preparedness Management Solutions

• Microsoft Office Groove 2007 : Use Groove to allow field units and on-scene response teams to share information with central offices. Create a virtual team environment using workspaces in Microsoft Office Groove 2007 for quick collaboration and knowledge sharing online and offline.



• Office SharePoint Server 2007 : Centralize emergency response plans and situation-specific data to provide roles-based access to the right information when needed. Increased integration of Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 with Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides rich tools, including dashboards with business intelligence, to enable greater view into resource allocation.



• Microsoft Office Live Communicator: Discuss issues and cases immediately using Microsoft Office Live Communicator 2007.



• Windows Rights Management Services (RMS): Manage increasing volumes of information by providing content authors and auditors with document versioning control, content expiration and archive settings, and protection for sensitive data. Help protect forms and templates from unauthorized changes by implementing Information Rights Management (IRM).



• Office Live Meeting: Enable people to easily gather in a virtual meeting setting, consolidate, find and share information, virtually anywhere, organization or connectivity, helping to increase everyone's speed and productivity.



• Office Enterprise or Professional Plus 2007: Use InfoPath Forms Services to create citizen-facing browser-based forms that help streamline information gathering. Minimize time spent with manual administrative processes by using collaboration, workflow, and forms automation capabilities.

More Information
Microsoft launches the Joint Emergency Preparedness Response System (JEPRS).