Hi everyone!

Last week both me and Daniel Pereira went to Porto for the LRG Forum where the Microsoft Citizen Service Platform was launched.

On this event we did two presentations, one showing the Executive Portal for Porto Council and another demoing our contribution for the CSP, using a lite version of our solution.

The Porto Council Executive Portal is based on our solution for Council Meetings: CaveDigital Board Meeting 2007, Town Hall Edition, which has already beaten the initial estimated Return Of Investment - we initially estimated that 11 trees would be saved yearly.

Based on live data, we can now estimate, so far, that Porto Council will spare 30 trees per year by lowering drastically their paper consumption. These yearly 4 tons of wood, still had to be converted to paper. Since this isn't happening anymore, that's around 51 million Kw/year that don't get spent on doing so, 1.3 tons/year of solid waste that don't happen anymore, 3 tons/year of CO₂ like gases that don't get generated and released to the atmosphere anymore and 91000 litres/year of water that don't get consumed anymore.

Another interesting fact is that prior to our solution, a staff of 4 people where needed, fulltime, to provision Council Meetings at Porto's (lots of photocopying had to happen). This staff of 4 would work for 2 weeks on average to prepare 1 Council Meeting (2 meetings happen regularly per month). Now, roughly, 1 person can do this work in 1 afternoon. That's around 7296 work hours freed yearly for more productive and value-adding tasks.

The cool thing is, summing on the national prize this project had already received, during the LRG Forum, the project got awarded another recognition, this time international: Sustainability Award - City of Porto and CaveDigital, Portugal.

To name a few, our solution is built on top of the following technologies:

• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
• Microsoft Office 2007 Professional
• Windows Workflow Foundation

For more information on our solution, please visit: http://www.cavedigital.com/bm/

For more information on Microsoft Citizen Service Platform, please visit: http://www.citizenserviceplatform.com/

Paper calculations thanks to http://www.papercalculator.org/