Safe Surfing
Safe Surfing provides citizens with vital information about how to protect themselves, their families and their computers whilst online.
OnlineNI
OnlineNI.net is a web portal which provides Northern Ireland citizens quick and easy access to a wide range of government and other public services.
Citizen e-mail
A new Citizen e-Mail Service is available through the OnlineNI portal. This service provides citizens with free access to easy to use email services.
Government Gateway
In Nov 2004, in partnership with Microsoft, Atos Origin and Dell, the e-Government unit launched a new Departmental Integration Server in Northern Ireland for connecting to the Government Gateway.
Increasing numbers of NI Public Sector bodies are integrating to Government Gateway in order to facilitate the provision of online transactional services to their citizens.
Smart Communities
What is a Smart Community?
A Smart Community is an interactive web-based application that allows a group of people to communicate and exchange information over the Internet in a private and secure area. Within each area participants are provided access to the following suite of powerful tools:-
- Articles
- Online Discussions
- Calendars
- Files
- Chat rooms
| - Notice Board
- Actions or To Do
- Images
- Polls
|
Smart Community Software
In January we established a Smart Community pilot project as part of the OnlineNI portal activity. The pilot ran until March 2005 when we decided with the main participants that it provided substantial benefits. The software is now administered by the Centre for Competitiveness (Michael Smith)
The introduction of the smart community pilot has enhanced OnlineNI by providing a web based collaborative tool which can be used by government, private and voluntary sectors to improve business performance and value for money.
It is particularly useful for groups or teams working in separate locations with a common purpose or outcome to achieve e.g. producing papers, arranging meetings/conferences, managing outcomes etc. We use the smart communities within DID, to support various committees and projects.
Self Service Pilot
For many service providers in Northern Ireland, whether you are an Agency, NDPB or local council there can be many barriers to providing services to citizens using the Internet:
- Developing the software yourself is complex and requires specialist skills.
- Contracting out the development is expensive.
- It takes a long time to complete the development.
- It takes a long time to recoup your initial investment, because transaction volumes are often low.
To overcome these barriers we have established a pilot that uses Lagan Technology’s Frontline software, operating as a shared service available to anyone in the NI public sector. This approach:
- Allows you to make simple transactions available to your customers very quickly and easily.
- Because DID is providing the funding for the shared infrastructure the cost of entry is very low.
- No specialist IT skills are required. In fact, if you have no spare resources at all, you can contract with Lagan and they will construct your web transactions for you.
What’s more is that the pilot uses the Government Gateway’s payment engine, giving you a transaction cost of only 9p, compared to commercial services that charge up to 27p.
For further details please contact either:
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