As the federal government becomes more transparent and the business value of social software is embraced by federal leaders, we wanted to take an opportunity to delve deeper into one of the more prolific information technology market providers (and incidentally, the backbone of Recovery.gov): Microsoft.

To find out more about what the Redmond, Wash., giant was up to in the federal landscape, OhMyGov! interviewed Microsoft's collaboration architect, Dean Halstead.

We asked Halstead about what it takes to penetrate the government information technology market.

"Technical adaption and security end-to-end," Halstead said. "One of the key issues is information security, which resonates amongst federal compliance officers, security professionals and enterprise information architects. The first trick is that you have to be on the network."

Unfortunately, newcomers trying enter the government market are generally shelved because of a culture misalignment that is often expressed as security or information architecture risk.

According to Halstead, this does not mean that newcomers can't enter the market, it's just harder. Typically it can take years to address all the information security, information assurance, and certification and accreditation processes that vary from agency to agency, he explained.

Microsoft crossed those hurdles long ago and is now well established in the federal space.

Federal entities with a license agreement for Microsoft SharePoint already own some of the most powerful enterprise solutions on the market. A recent social software market assessment that focused on products for internal workplace use found three standout leaders: Microsoft, Jive Software and IBM. All were given high rankings in both the ability to execute and completeness of vision.

Source: Gartner (October 2009)

According to the Gartner market assessment, "Microsoft has used the popularity of SharePoint to successfully deliver 'good enough' social capabilities to many mainstream organizations that value the breadth of the platform and the solidity of a large vendor."

But according to Halstead, in areas where SharePoint may not be the leader, it makes up by working with "best-of-breed" solutions like Jive Software, which combines broad support for structured collaboration with tasks, projects and limited workflow, via rich profiles, tagging, blogs, wikis and social network analytics.

"Platforms like Jive can easily run on a SharePoint platform and are less expensive than even some open source competition," Halstead expanded.

Additionally, since Microsoft platforms have been adopted by agencies and meet government security requirements, several newcomers and emerging leaders like JackBe are working with the Microsoft SharePoint platform due to its flexibility. "Our government partners, get not only the best of Microsoft, they can draw from other 'best-of-bread' solutions," Halstead said.

Indeed, speaking with several of Microsoft's customers found that, whereas the Windows operating system may be the target of humorous Apple commercials, the company's enterprise solutions for government are respected.

Office of Naval Research Chief Information Office Brian Reily said that like most federal agencies, "We are facing increasing pressure to lower the cost of providing and maintaining IT services for our customers... at the same time where federal agencies are being challenged by senior leadership to facilitate transformational change to enterprise business operations."

In a demonstration case attempting to leverage off-the-shelf and open source technologies for rapid technology deployment, the agility of Microsoft products like SharePoint was evaluated and validated.

According to Dano DeBrox, ONR Director, Disruptive Business Technologies, the Microsoft platform enables better leverage of worldwide IT assets.

“It just made sense to go with Microsoft," DeBrox said. "Using SharePoint and having a pubic folder in Exchange pop up as a Web part on the dashboard to show a discussion thread back and forth—as well as the inherent capability that come with SharePoint—really worked incredibly well.”

Another user is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), which manage the world's largest archive of weather data. This 1.2 petabyte data store required a cost-effective solution that could be easily transitioned to in-house management. The Center did not want to retrain its own personnel to use a new system, and it needed a solution that thousands of researchers around the world could adopt seamlessly. More importantly, it needed a system that was certified to comply with federal government DOD 5015. 2 standard for document management.

Since NCDC already used Microsoft products, they turned to SharePoint, which could be applied to the Center's proprietary framework and could easily be customized to maintain the look and feel of the existing records management interface. The platform was used to develop the Environmental Document Access Display System, a simple, reliable records management system that could be manged in-house. Internal and external users could get by with minimal training and organizational pain. 

"The data we're managing with the Office SharePoint Server will help us make more accurate weather and climate forecasts. That will reverberate throughout the economy," said Tom Ross, Climate Database Modernization Program manager.

What government IT professionals are observing is that organization stakeholders can build on existing IT offerings, leverage existing infrastructure, and tap into powerful new capabilities through a platform like SharePoint.

Are federal agencies maximizing the value of SharePoint? Many are not, if for basic reasons. We have heard time and again that feds just aren't sure what they own, or that they don't have the money, the personnel, the time, the skills, training and so on to deploy it effectively and rapidly. Well guess what? Most likely your agency already owns it!

In a follow-up story next week, we'll look at the bells and whistles of SharePoint and Microsoft's new Gov 2.0 kit.

UPDATE: Part two is posted here