The London Borough of Newham has unveiled the first fruits of its controversial deal with Microsoft.
The deal between the council and Microsoft, signed last year, followed an evaluation of the benefits of Linux' and Microsoft's technologies — which concluded that Microsoft offered the best value.
Newham’s head of ICT Richard Steel told ZDNet UK sister site silicon.com he has no regrets about signing the deal: "We are pleased with Microsoft’s performance. Since we made our decision to go with Microsoft I tend to think more than ever we made the right decision."
One of the first projects implemented is the Open Application Sharing Portal, which will allow local authorities to share best practice and source code to cut development costs.
For example, an e-ticketing toolkit developed by the Royal Borough of Kingston, running on Microsoft Commerce Server 2002, is available to other local authorities via the portal.
"We hope that it will provide a key facility to enable organisations to share code. What Microsoft is doing is supporting open application sharing and that’s one of the reasons we are keen to work with them," Steel said.
Newham also plans to use technologies such as Microsoft BizTalk Server to connect up services such as council tax, housing, environment, social services and education and make them accessible to the council's customer service staff through a single access point.
"In areas such as BizTalk Microsoft has products that have a real lead," said Steel.
The council is also working on a number of other projects including employee self-service and e-forms, as well as electronic monitoring systems in the home.
And while it has a "Microsoft-centric" strategy, it still finds some room for open source: "We do use Linux in some areas such as for Web servers and have no immediate plans to discontinue," said Steel.
Talkback
Astounding. Truly astounding that ZD UK is now hounding companies that dare to shun Linux as though they have to explain themselves to this web site. The Onion often features articles like this- 'Area man happy with purchase'. There, it's funny. Here, it's pathetic.
ZD- redeem yourself by reporting on this:
http://www.novell.com/success/volcker.html
Go on. I dare you.
Let me understand...
Microsoft help you to share YOUR code between office since it's based upon his HIGH COST solutions... very bright!
This is reallly a strange concept of the benefit that the Microsoft solutions gives over Free Software :)
I understand that they have done the most dumb (and costly) decision they could, and now they have to justify their slaveness upon costly, closed, single providers Microsoft "solution".
Poor them :)
I wish them luck once all the redesigning, reprogramming, remodelling, resizing, re-inventing, etc starts because of Longhorn and other recommended/required upgrades that'll impact vital parts of their house of cards over time and over various organizations. And vice versa.
It'll be interesting to see how things develop over a longer period of time. Likely the devil will be in the (legal) details.
It would also be interesting to see comparetive case studies with solutions like WebSphere, Sonic, eXtend, DirXML, etc in place with reference to Newham.
In response to the first Talkback...yes, it would be truly astounding if we were hounding Newham Council. We're not. This article (written by silicon.com, incidentally) reports the work that Newham and Microsoft have carried out on several e-government projects. If Microsoft and Newham didn't want to talk about the issue, they probably wouldn't have issued a press release about it.
If we were so keen to hound Newham, I guess we wouldn't have reported last month that their head of ICT had won the title of Public Sector CIO of the year.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/0,39020645,39191518,00.htm
Graeme