Increase productivity Out-of-the-box integration with project management and budgeting, along with online access to familiar tools for the creation and distribution of content, helps your employees to spend less time managing content and more time providing exemplary government services. In addition, a built-in Internet Content Management Server helps you more easily create and maintain public Internet sites. With the added features available with ECAL, you can use features, such as Report Center, line of business data integration, Forms Server, and FAST Enterprise Search, to increase the impact of available knowledge and expertise.

Facilitate collaboration Integrated collaborative tools and out-of-the-box wiki, blog, and podcasting capabilities, along with free add-ons, make it easy to integrate with social networking tools, such as Twitter and Facebook, and to help your employees easily maintain task lists, publish documents, and deliver relevant content to constituents. With the added features available with ECAL, your organization can stay on top of conversation trends on popular Web 2.0 sites or on internally hosted Gov 2.0 sites with alerts based on mined data and extraction from FAST.

Lower total cost of ownership No matter how much needed capability an IT solution provides, if it is difficult to use, adoption is likely to suffer. By taking advantage of familiar Microsoft Office tools, you can not only better visualize what's going on in your agency, but you can also leverage your existing technology investments and knowledge base, helping to decrease training and support costs. Built-in line-of-business integration, analytics, data visualization, and business intelligence dashboards, combined with versioning and conversation history, also simplify reporting and transparency efforts.

To participate in the recent economic stimulus packages enacted by congress, government agencies need to establish a high level of transparency and accountability. According to internet evolution, a recent study by Greg Elin at the Sunlight Foundation reported that most weekly reports on stimulus funds were submitted in Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets. Wouldn't it be great if your organization could transform those spreadsheets into public and executive dashboards, consolidate those reports into one centrally located, Web-based repository, and then extract pertinent data from them?

With Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise, your organization can have that central dashboard and repository up and running in just days—not weeks or months.

Even if your agency already uses Office SharePoint Server 2007, you may be able to deliver even more services for a lower cost. For example, you can define, manage, and roll out governance for documents, records, business processes, metadata tagging, and retention. And you can mine data from unstructured reports and repositories to extract trends and analyze comments to find out what the data, alone, doesn't say.

Together with the 2007 Microsoft Office system, you can use Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise to help your workers and your organization to be more productive, without dramatically changing the way they work. For example, instead of using e-mail to send a spreadsheet to a colleague, you can send the spreadsheet to a SharePoint site. The report goes directly into a repository and is published to the dashboard. The way you work doesn't really change much, but your efficiency does.

For example, in a recent implementation of SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise by a U.S. Department of Defense Major Command that collected data from 26 different organizations, the organization saved 156 person-days, normalized data in its reporting, increased data accuracy, and decreased end-user reporting time. The payback period for the solution investment of four days was just one week.

If your organization requires the scalability and flexibility of cloud-based services, Microsoft SharePoint Online gives your organization a highly secure, central location to support business cycles from beginning to end. Your employees and the partner agencies they work with on a day-to-day basis can create and manage team-focused and project-focused sites, find organizational resources, manage content and workflow, and improve overall agency transparency.

Upgrade to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise

To get a more comprehensive suite of services that will help you meet your transparency goals, consider the Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise CAL (SharePoint ECAL). With Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise, you can use FAST Enterprise Search to get better answers more quickly by extracting business intelligence from unstructured content, performing role-based searches, automating metadata and entity extraction, and dramatically increasing the ability to find relevant content for integrated analytics. SharePoint ECAL also offers PerformancePoint Services for Office SharePoint 2007, which delivers rich and interactive dashboards, root cause analysis, heat maps, data drilldown, balanced scorecards, and business process management for improved transparency, along with built-in approval processes for greater accountability. In addition, you can use SharePoint forms services to store and organize rich, dynamic Web-based forms to gather, share, extract, reuse, and manage information in your business and workflow processes.

If your organization requires the scalability and flexibility of cloud-based services, Microsoft SharePoint Online gives your organization a highly secure, central location to support business cycles from beginning to end. Your employees and the partner agencies they work with on a day-to-day basis can create and manage team-focused and project-focused sites, find organizational resources, manage content and workflow, and improve overall agency transparency.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Enterprise Edition Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Enterprise Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Configuration Management License Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 Client Monitoring Windows Rights Management Services Microsoft Forefront Security Suite