To better serve its constituents, the King County Department of Information Technology has developed 200-plus solutions on Power Platform, including a wide range of low-code portals using Power Pages.
November 02, 2021
King County delivers critical services using Microsoft Power Pages
“Power Pages has made it easier for us to provide people with a more connected experience and reduce the barriers to getting the services they need.”
Sandra Valdivia, IT Services Manager, King County Department of Information Technology
King County is one of the fastest-growing counties in the US by population—and the number of services provided by the county has been growing equally fast to keep up. Even by the standards of the largest county governments in the country, the list is impressive—from regional services like health and transit to local services such as building permits, police protection, and local parks. The government also supports the community with a wide variety of education, job training, and fundraising programs.
Delivering this broad range of services requires an equally vast network of information channels, both internally and externally. For King County, these channels were often bogged down with manual, paper-based processes and costly, custom-coded websites. Rapid growth and expansion only worsened the problem. That all began to change when the King County Department of Information Technology (KCIT) started moving to a low-code development strategy using Power Pages.
For KCIT, Power Pages was a natural fit. The department was already using Power Apps and the broader Microsoft Power Platform to modernize its business applications (and now has more than 200 Power Apps applications in production). While custom-coded applications are still part of the infrastructure, KCIT prefers to use Power Platform whenever possible for new development. “We have a low-code-first strategy here at King County,” says Sandra Valdivia, IT Services Manager at KCIT. “Building on one common platform—Microsoft Power Platform—is simply faster and efficient.”
Just as Power Apps has transformed business application development at King County, Power Pages has brought a new level of efficiency to its intranet and external website development. “To build the kind of custom websites that we require, with all the necessary security, can take anywhere from six months to two years using traditional code. With Power Pages, we can often go live with a site in a matter of weeks,” says Valdivia.
The simplicity of Power Pages plays a large part in this quick development—and KCIT has added to this efficiency with its own best practices. As Valdivia says, “While Power Pages does give us a lot of room for customization, we try to keep things simple and reuse our existing templates where possible.” While the approach is largely standardized, the portals that KCIT has created are as varied as the services they support. Here are just a few examples:
An external website was built using Microsoft Power Pages to streamline the application process for organizations who wanted to participate in King County’s Employee Giving Program.
Employee Giving Program
King County employees donate to their choice of nonprofit organizations within the county through its Employee Giving Program (EPG). To select the more than 1,100 organizations that qualify for the program, the EGP team reviews thousands of applications each year.
To streamline the process, KCIT decided to stand up a website using Power Pages. “This was one of our first Power Pages projects—but, with our previous Power Platform work, we felt confident that we could learn as we went along,” says Andreas Chew, Senior Application Developer at King County Information Technology. And he was right. In just 23 days, a small team of developers built a portal to streamline the entire EGP application and registration process.
The integration of Power Pages with King County’s existing Dynamics 365 infrastructure proved particularly helpful. “One thing about Power Pages that we really like is that the forms we need for the portal can be built using the same out-of-the box table structure in Dataverse that we use in Dynamics CRM,” says Chew.
KCIT also leveraged the pre-built contact entity structure provided within Dataverse and Dynamics 365 to build a user registration experience within the portal. All contacts are then managed through the Dataverse admin portal—the same toolset that KCIT was already using within Dynamics 365. If a user was already registered in the program from a previous year, they could create an account within the portal using an email that was already on file in Dataverse. This also made it easier to access registrations forms also on file.
Microsoft Power Pages made it easier to integrate King County’s Employee Giving Program website with its Dynamics 365 environment, including Dataverse.
Just as planned, the portal has made for a dramatic improvement in the registration process. “Submitting an application into the program used to take organizations over 30 minutes. With our new portal in Power Pages that same process can now be completed in 10 minutes,” says Valdivia. Users obviously like the time savings as program participation is up 43% since the portal was introduced. This is also supported with another component of the portal that allows users to refer other nonprofit organizations to the program.
Once participants have registered, the portal infrastructure has also helped streamline internal reviews. Where before, workflows were often scattered across email, now all registrations are consolidated in Dataverse and managed through Dynamics 365. The ability to easily filter and sort registrants allows for expedited processing times. Once a list of approved applicants is finalized it is transferred to their e-commerce system where King County staff make donations.
COVID-19 response management
About two years ago, King County engaged its public health emergency response agency to build out a call center to better support the community. To keep call center staff informed on the latest health news, KCIT set up an internal site using Power Pages and loaded it with a rich library of knowledge-based articles. The portal turned out to be even more valuable than the county expected.
Calls increased as community members looked to the Public Health emergence response team for guidance. Initially, staff had to rely on paper-based scripts to provide the correct guidance. KCIT had a better idea: enable staff to access COVID-19 resources directly from the existing portal. “With a Microsoft Power Pages already in place, we were able to quickly add to it—and provide 100 call center staff with an up-to-date COVID-19 resource library in just two days,” says Jeremiah Sullivan, Senior Application Developer at KCIT.
That same library was also used to spin up a related, health chatbot. Pre-built APIs simplified the development, connecting Azure bot services to the knowledge base in Dataverse.
Meanwhile, news of the portal spread quickly to upper management. The timing was ideal. The county was in urgent need of a new COVID-19 vaccination scheduling system, as the current system could not be customized as needed. “Based on how quickly and easily we developed our internal portal, Microsoft Power Pages was seen as the ideal platform, quickly building out our external scheduling system as well,” says Sullivan.
Better yet, King County discovered that Microsoft had already developed a customer-ready version of its Microsoft Vaccination Management (MVM) solution using Power Pages. The MVM solution was designed specifically to help accelerate delivery and administration of COVID-19 vaccinations.
To better manage COVID-19 vaccinations, King County deployed the Microsoft Vaccination Management (MVM) solution, including a portal built on Power Pages. A patient questionnaire inside the portal can be quickly customized to accommodate changing conditions.
The solution includes a registration and booking portal and, unlike the previous solution, enabled quick customization such as support for multiple languages. At the heart of the portal is a patient questionnaire that can be quickly modified to accommodate changing conditions. The solution also includes access to the county’s COVID-19 knowledge base, frontline worker and site management applications, and reporting via Power BI dashboards.
Just like the call center solution before it, the MVM solution was successfully customized and deployed on an extremely tight timeline. Almost 80,000 people within King County have scheduled appointments using the solution. In fact, the project has been so successful that King County is considering using MVM for all vaccinations going forward.
Much more to come
The list of sites deployed using Power Pages continues to grow at King County.
A simple scheduling portal, for example, fulfills a critical need for a home safety program for the elderly. The application enables scheduling an in-home assessment with emergency medical services. Recommendations are then made available on the portal using a highly secure login.
Another portal has provided companies involved in real estate transactions with a faster, more secure way to send forms to King County. Previously, these forms were sent via email as PDFs. Today, these companies log in to upload records to a secure storage in Dataverse. Other projects built with Power Pages include a site for applying for public transit passes, and another for locating resources for at-risk youth.
Yet another solution built by King County using Power Pages is the Fall Prevention app which supports a home safety program for the elderly.
As Valdivia says, “Power Pages has made it easier for us to provide people with a more connected experience and reduce the barriers to getting the services they need.” That’s been good news for the developers within KCIT—and even better news for the residents of King County.
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