When the Mexican Congress passed legislation in 2008, the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI) became an autonomous agency, responsible for coordinating and managing the production of statistical and geographic information about the country, including population figures, economic data, and geographical facts. Because this information is produced by several different governmental agencies, it was necessary for INEGI to create a way to collaborate and coordinate with these other agencies. Working with bSide, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, INEGI used Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 to create a collaboration portal in just two months. The portal provides an easy way for Mexican governmental agencies to interact and collaborate on common projects that affect the way that statistical information is gathered, processed, and published.

Situation
The Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI), which may be translated as the National Institute of Statistics and Geography, organizes statistical, demographic, geographical, and economic information about the country. INEGI is headquartered in Aguascalientes, Mexico, employs 18,000 people, and has offices around the country.

INEGI works with 32 state governments, 2,445 municipal governments, and 18 federal agencies to collect and produce data. INEGI had to find a way to standardize data collection, verification, and publication methods, to avoid disorganization, inaccuracies, and information being out-of-date. The various government agencies which INEGI works with have their own data collection rules and workflows, but information must also be exchanged between agencies. These exchanges involved sending paper documents through traditional mail, exchanging paper documents in face-to-face meetings, and sending files as email attachments.

By using SharePoint Server 2010, INEGI was able to quickly create a collaboration portal that simplified information-sharing among hundreds of government agencies. Silvia Fraustro Subdirector, Technology Integration Projects, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía

In April 2008, the Mexican government passed legislation ordering INEGI to coordinate the national statistics-collection effort and to create the technology infrastructure needed to make it happen. The new law required INEGI to establish a National System for Statistical and Geographical Information (SNIEG), defining it as a set of procedures governing the way that government agencies would produce and share information of national interest. INEGI needed to create a collaboration portal by the end of 2010 that would enable agencies to share information according to SNIEG guidelines.

The portal would give employees in the various governmental agencies a way to meet and discuss different topics and to document work sessions and assignments, schedule meetings, post documents, and keep track of contacts. Of course, whatever collaboration mechanism that INEGI created had to provide flexible but airtight security mechanisms for ensuring that only authorized individuals could access certain documents.

INEGI invested a year of effort in developing the portal, but ultimately there were too many challenges in creating a solution from scratch that met its needs.

Solution
In late 2009, INEGI began to look at commercial collaboration programs. It learned of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 from its local Microsoft representatives and realized that many of the capabilities it had tried to develop laboriously from scratch were included in SharePoint Server 2010. Microsoft introduced INEGI to bSide, a local Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, which helped it get the portal project—called the SNIEG Collaboration Portal—back on track.

“We had used Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 before and knew that it was a high-quality, well-supported product,” says Silvia Fraustro, Subdirector of Technology Integration Projects for INEGI. “Also, many of the features of SharePoint Server 2010 were naturally aligned with this project.”

Quick Development of Security, Workflows, User Interface
The professionals at bSide helped the INEGI development team implement SharePoint Server 2010, and also customized Web Parts and the user interface. The team used Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate for Web Part customization; as an example, bSide created a custom Web Part that updates user information based on the originating Active Directory directory service domain. Active Directory is the directory service technology included in the Windows Server operating system. The portal pulls information from the internal INEGI Active Directory domain and from an external domain that serves all other agencies.

Many of the features of SharePoint Server 2010 were naturally aligned with this project. Silvia Fraustro Subdirector, Technology Integration Projects, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía

Developers took advantage of security improvements in SharePoint Server 2010 to assign each individual roles and profiles based on their Active Directory credentials and to dictate which data on the portal they were authorized to access.

“We also used Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 to customize the master pages and style sheets, to make it easier for other federal agencies to submit data to INEGI in standardized ways,” says Nancy Amaro Mejía, Project Leader at bSide. “It is also planned to create automated workflows in SharePoint Server 2010 to enable federal employees to route and approve documents electronically.”

To make the portal interface more visual and to simplify navigation through the approximately 30 subsites, bSide used the Microsoft Silverlight 4 browser plug-in. Federal employees can see a visual map of the portal and simply click on the agency, study group, or document library that they want to visit.

Central Place to Submit, Create, and Share Data
In May 2010, INEGI rolled out the SNIEG Collaboration Portal to a small group of employees in the INEGI IT department for trial use. The portal enables government agencies to create teams that can collaboratively author and share documents. They can also use blogs to collaborate, route documents by using automated workflows, tag and organize documents for improved clarity and security, and search for information anywhere on the portal.

The objective of the portal is to help coordinate the exchange of information between different agencies in compliance with SNIEG guidelines. Employees with highly specialized knowledge in various topics such as economics, geography, statistics, and agriculture can now share documents such as work programs, agreements, minutes, and research documents.

By combining SharePoint Server 2010 with Microsoft Office 2010—to be rolled out agency wide later in 2010—INEGI employees will be able to take advantage of the Microsoft Word 2010 co-authoring feature, which will enable a group of people to work on a document at the same time. Employees can also view the availability of other authors and easily initiate a conversation without leaving Word 2010.

With electronic forms and automated workflows, Mexican federal employees will quickly and consistently review and finalize documents and make sure that they end up in the right place. “When documents were shared by email and postal mail, sometimes there were problems with version control, and it took too long to finalize them,” Fraustro says.

New Ways to Organize and Find Information
INEGI is taking advantage of a SharePoint Server 2010 feature called document sets, which are groups of related documents to which teams can assign common behaviors or appearances using metadata, workflows, or customized visual experiences. For example, INEGI can create document sets by agency and topic. All the documents in a document set share the same metadata, and the entire set can be versioned as a whole and downloaded as a compressed .zip file. After a working group finalizes a document, it is automatically transferred from its original document set to a document library where all authorized users can access it.

We also used Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 to customize the master pages and style sheets, to make it easier for other federal agencies to submit data to INEGI in standardized ways. Nancy Amaro Mejía Project Leader, bSide

Users are also using managed metadata fields in SharePoint Server 2010 to organize documents in a standardized yet flexible way. Users can tag their documents with keywords for easy search, choosing from a fixed list of document categories while also adding custom tags for further refinement.

INEGI is currently using the built-in search capability of the SharePoint Server keyword feature, and is also investigating Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for delivering more customized and detailed search results. “Most of the information on the portal is confidential, and we were able to easily block certain documents from search results according to user permission levels using SharePoint Server features,” Fraustro says.

The SNIEG Collaboration Portal will be live soon, and federal agencies will quickly be adding content and learning how to use it. “Agencies will be adding documents to the portal very quickly; we are seeing great adoption because the portal is so easy to use,” Fraustro says. When the portal is in production use, it will be used by 3,500 government employees across 2,496 agencies.

Benefits
By using SharePoint Server 2010, INEGI was able to quickly create the collaboration portal mandated by federal legislation and enable federal and regional agencies to submit and share documents more easily than ever before. With all agencies sharing documents electronically, the collaboration effort and document quality will be higher, which leads to better decisions.

Centralized Collaboration Portal
INEGI now has a central place to coordinate, store, and share documents among thousands of federal, state, and local agencies. “The portal provides more effective coordination between the various agencies,” Fraustro says. “Employees in these agencies can now collaborate more quickly with an easy-to-use interface.”

Further, SNIEG currently has 63 collegial bodies or working groups, each one with 30 members on average. These groups meet several times a year. Organizing the meetings over the phone used to take several days. Now, says Josefina Calva, Subdirector, National Information System Planning, “Through the portal, this will be done in minutes, with the advantage that participants could view the agenda and meeting materials from the time they get the invitation, and also they could confirm their attendance.”

The portal also helps INEGI facilitate information gathering through online questionnaires. “It used to take months to send, collect, and process information through printed questionnaires,” says Fraustro. Each SNIEG member is now notified to respond to an online questionnaire in the portal. “We can monitor which questionnaires have been completed and send alerts to those who have yet to return their questionnaire. This reduces the time for gathering and processing the questionnaires to just a few days.”

Rapid Two-Month Delivery
By using SharePoint Server 2010, INEGI was able to create an inter-agency collaboration portal in just two months. “By using SharePoint Server 2010, INEGI was able to quickly create a collaboration portal that simplified information sharing among hundreds of government agencies,” Fraustro says. “We were able to create this portal in a matter of weeks, whereas before we spent more than a year on a similar effort. Plus, we ended up with many more capabilities this time around. Without all the built-in features in SharePoint Server 2010, we might have spent 12 months creating the portal using other technologies or new development efforts.”

Data Shared Easily
Using the portal and features such as Word 2010 co-authoring, employees across multiple agencies can more easily share information and collaborate. “Previously, we had difficulties trying to get people from all over the country together to fashion documents,” Fraustro says. “With the portal, authors will be able to work together much more easily and in real time. We no longer have to send documents by standard mail or email and wait for a response.”

Different agencies can log on to the portal and collaborate on particular subjects, such as specific political, economic, and environmental topics. They can work on documents together, post blog entries, and use SharePoint workflows to automatically route documents for review and approval. “Federal employees are using blogs to make the collaboration process easy,” Fraustro says. “Blogs provide a quick way for team members to share information and discuss specialized topics.”

Better Decision Making
“Technology mapped to the business processes help us make better decisions,” says Calva. “For instance, the portal allows INEGI to carry out the monitoring of the agreements that are generated in the meetings, as well conduct follow-up on the working groups projects. This facilitates the coordination role of INEGI and allows us to make better decisions for the SNIEG.”

Specialists from hundreds of agencies can now work together and agree on guidelines, about how and which statistical and geographical information of National Relevance to produce.

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 is the business collaboration platform for the Enterprise and the Internet.

For more information about Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, go to:
www.microsoft.com/sharepoint

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For more information about bSide products and services, visit the website at:
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For more information about Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía, call 01 800 111 46 34 or visit the website at:
www.inegi.org.mx