Whether your agency is ready for the cloud now or planning for the future, Microsoft SharePoint 2010 for government gives you freedom of choice. You can leverage your existing investments in Microsoft products to move to the cloud and have the option of an on-premises software solution or a public/private cloud services solution—in any combination that works best for your specific requirements.

Other cloud services vendors offer little more than virtual machines; your agency still bears the burden of building, patching, supporting, and scaling servers. Microsoft provides the full range of hosting options and reliable application management your agency needs to reduce its infrastructure footprint and IT expenses. The Microsoft public cloud can handle most of your everyday SharePoint workloads, while Microsoft private cloud offerings and on-premises hosting may be the most effective approach for your more complex, mission-critical operations.

Encompassing the full life cycle of content management, SharePoint 2010 automates processes to let you quickly author, publish, and manage sites, and the technology supports self-service features for internal users and constituents. Agency staff can take advantage of flexible records management support with hierarchical file plans, FAST search, and enhanced reporting and auditing. Compliance features let you apply policy or classify content based on properties, differentiate between documents and records, and apply holds to content throughout the entire repository.

Content creation improvements extend beyond SharePoint 2010 to the entire Microsoft Office system. Adherence to the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard allows SharePoint technologies to interact with your other content management systems and helps increase user adoption. 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.

By letting staff work in ways that are most effective for them, SharePoint 2010 enables rich, real-time collaboration in pursuit of agency goals, whether people are offline or connected to the network with a PC or a mobile device. Seamless integration between Microsoft SharePoint and Office 2010 helps users to be more productive with familiar products and tools. And with SharePoint Online, included with the Microsoft Office 365 subscription service, your agency gains a comprehensive suite of collaboration and communication tools designed specifically for the cloud. Remote users can easily search for documents and for people across the organization, the same way they search the web, and work on documents from almost anywhere using Microsoft Office Web Apps.

Network-challenged sites and remote 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 data.

To meet requirements like Gov 2.0 social networking and the Open Government Directive, you need a platform that’s as agile as you are. Whether you’re building a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request portal, a citizen participation portal, or an Open Government site to expose important information and services to the public, SharePoint technologies can help.

Many organizations still have legacy applications, so Microsoft has invested significantly in interoperability with other vendors. SharePoint 2010 supports more than 30 different standards, including Representational State Transfer (REST); Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI); and OpenSearch, to give you an integrated, 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 your agency’s diverse needs.