Industry Success: The Local Government Sector

Public Sector organizations around the world have adopted SharePoint to support document collaboration and knowledge sharing, and as a primary way to reduce IT costs and overhead through centralized administration. SharePoint can reduce the costs and complexity by reducing infrastructure and support costs, and by leveraging the built-in integrations to the Microsoft Office suite and providing an easy-to-use interface for both end users and IT administrators.

 

However, as an extranet for Local Government, SharePoint can have added complexity and require additional management oversight. Public Sector organizations at every level often need to collaborate with a number of external suppliers, vendors, and partner organizations that work closely with cities, towns, local municipalities, counties and boroughs to deliver personnel, products and services. And as government institutions, these organizations must also follow stringent security and external user access of government resources.

 

External collaboration is critical to Local Governments, who need to work closely with a number of outside stakeholders. Specifically, they need to enable:

 

• Partner agencies to share information and submit data for analysis 
• Board and committee members to collaborate across multiple private sites and areas
• Field workers to keep in touch, but don't regularly access an internal network
• Citizens to register for government services, and pay taxes and service fees online
• Business owners to submit requests and file documents 

 

Extranet User Manager has extensive experience in extending the capabilities of SharePoint and Office 365 to deliver extranet solutions for the Public Sector, including a wide range of industry requirements:

 

• Provide customized welcome landing pages that display the sites their users have access to.
• Store external users outside of their Active Directory Domain. 
• Allow external users to create and service their own identities for various applications. 
• Provide self-registration, workflow, delegated administration, and customer attributes such as password resets, and utilize active group directories.  
• Set reasonably complex password criteria, and two-factor authentication
• Set regular reminders to check if users still need access.
• Provide links to additional secure sites that serve various audiences.

 

For Local Government organizations where budgets and technical personnel are limited, maintaining an effective and secure extranet is business-critical. Extranet User Manager is a cost-effective, standalone business solution that can support authentication, self-registration, and delegated administration, making it an essential tool to leverage all of the capabilities of SharePoint and Office 365 when collaborating with external stakeholders. 

 

If you are part of a Local Government organization and want to streamline your back-office administrative tasks while also reducing your operational costs, take a look at the in-depth case studies and additional resources available on the EUM Local Government Industry Success site, or test drive our solutions today.