G2G Marketplace and Oakland County

The G2G Marketplace was developed by Oakland County, Michigan to offer solutions from government partners and approved vendors to government agencies through an online store experience. The goal of this initiative is to provide governments with an easy way to research, purchase, and implement technology solutions and professional services. The G2G Marketplace will simplify the purchase and licensing process with pre-negotiated blanket purchase agreements so government agencies can utilize technology and services quickly.

Extranet User Manager is a complete, all-in-one, cost-effective business solution that facilitates collaboration within a secure site. A must-have for any small government looking for ways to increase business productivity and streamline communication with external identity management.

Oakland County's challenge was to find an extranet solution that managed external identities and allowed external users to create and service their own identities for various applications within the G2G Marketplace. Originally Oakland County had developed their own home grown .net app that created users and reset their passwords with user delegation. However, they found their tool lacked some of the features required and was unable to support self-registration, workflow, delegated administration, and customer attributes such as password resets and utilize active group directories. Oakland County found that the majority of extranet solutions cost several million dollars and required a multi-year integration process. Oakland County decided to go with Extranet User Manager (EUM) as a cost-effective standalone business solution that would support authentication, self-registration and delegated administration for multiple users across every platform in their industry within a time-sensitive environment.

Oakland County originally went with the Form Based Authentication (FBA) Version of EUM, but realized that the Federated Version offered tools that were a "game changer" for government. The upgrade to the Federated Version of EUM allowed Oakland County to use EUM as their standalone business solution across every application within their infrastructure. EUM's user friendly Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) integration allowed Oakland County to authenticate internal and external employees and contractors with their internal credentials. The business investment with EUM appeals to small governments because of its low-cost entry point and ability to implement a full identity management system in a short period of time. EUM's cost model does not charge per user which allows small governments to scale up and increase business initiatives among public users. Since implementation, Oakland County's SharePoint farm has grown from 150 users to 300 and is expected to continue growing to thousands. Nonetheless, with the sizeable increase of users, EUM's password reset and self-service identity management saved Oakland County time and money by eliminating mundane tasks that would have normally been sent to their support queue. Oakland County also found that EUM had remarkable mobile responsiveness which further contributed to the efficient streamlining of communication and identity management within the G2G marketplace. Overall Oakland County describes their experience with EUM as a "game changing" cost-effective business investment that continues to provide governance within a collaborative and secure environment.