With new requirements, like Gov 2.0 social networking and the Open Government Directive, you need a platform that is as agile as you are. Whether you are trying to build a Freedom of Information Act (FIOA) request portal, a citizen participation portal, or an Open Government site to expose important information and services to the public, SharePoint can help your organization. Combine its broad capabilities to create new solutions, or visit Open Source SharePoint communities to modify existing templates.

Many organizations still have legacy applications, so Microsoft has invested significantly in interoperability with other vendors. SharePoint supports more than 32 different standards, including Representational State Transfer (REST), Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI), and OpenSearch, to allow your organization to have not only an integrated solution but also an enterprise solution. Because the SharePoint collaboration platform can be deployed across all types of sites—as part of your intranet, extranet, or Internet—your IT department can realize significant cost savings by using a single platform to address the agency’s diverse needs.

SharePoint 2010 provides capabilities that encompass the full life cycle of content management—from creation to disposition. In addition to automated processes to quickly author, publish, and manage sites and to provide self-service features for internal usage and for constituents, your agency staff can take advantage of flexible records management support with hierarchical file plans, FAST search, and enhanced reporting and auditing. SharePoint 2010 also allows you to apply policy or to classify content based on properties, to differentiate between documents and records, and to apply holds to content throughout the entire repository.

Content creation improvements extend beyond SharePoint to the entire Office System. Take advantage of the Microsoft investment in the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard to allow SharePoint to interact with your other content management systems and help increase user adoption.

By letting staff work in ways that are most effective for them, SharePoint 2010 enables collaboration without compromise in pursuit of agency goals, whether individuals are offline or are connected to the network with a PC, a Web browser, or a mobile phone. These capabilities are significantly enhanced by the seamless integration between SharePoint and Office 2010, helping users to be more productive with familiar products and tools.

Network-challenged sites and traveling collaboration users can benefit from SharePoint Workspace and the Microsoft Office Upload Center. You can take your entire site offline for mobile employees with a single click, and Information Rights Management provides added protection for your information. The Upload Center even allows mobile users that are severely bandwidth challenged to continue to work during network outages and only requires changes which are tracked at the binary level to be posted to SharePoint.

Whether your organization is ready for the cloud or merely developing a road map for moving collaboration into the cloud, Microsoft and SharePoint can help. You can leverage your existing investment in Microsoft products to move to the cloud and have the option of an on-premise software solution or cloud services solution—or a combination of both.

With dynamic, easily deployed solutions, SharePoint 2010 offers out-of-the-box capabilities for designing solutions that can be integrated with existing applications, processes, and enterprise data. All users, regardless of their technical expertise, can customize the collaboration platform to meet their specific needs—without burdening your IT team.

Build powerful reports with PowerPivot, with datasets of 100 million rows. With Access Services, users can move away from access database solutions on their file drives and publish to a Web-based SharePoint interface. Lastly, with Visio and Visio Services, you can easily hook data to floor plans, operation centers, and process diagrams to show data in a new and powerful way.