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Granicus Uses ISV to Boost Government Accountability with Software-plus-Services Solution

10/12/2009

The Internet is a powerful tool for government agencies that wish to provide timely, accurate information to constituents. However, constraints such as costs, limited resources for IT administration, and connectivity issues sometimes hamper the ability of public organizations to use the Web to its fullest potential. Granicus, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, tackled the problem by creating a suite of solutions using a software-plus-services approach based on Microsoft technologies. The resulting products provide government agencies with the speed and flexibility of locally installed software and the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of hosted solutions.

Situation

Information is the lifeblood of effective public government. In the past decade, government agencies of every size have adopted Internet-based technology and content to keep the public informed about their activities. The ongoing challenge has been balancing the need to efficiently deliver information without overwhelming the IT capabilities of agencies that typically operate under tight budgets and have limited administrative staff.

Granicus is a San Francisco-based company that helps nearly 600 local and state government agencies tackle this challenge.  Founded in 1999, the company has achieved steady growth over the years by providing comprehensive streaming media and public meeting management solutions. These combine software, hardware, IT infrastructure components, and Granicus expertise to help government agencies create, manage, and distribute live and on-demand media content over the Internet.

Granicus customers, including major cities such as Miami and Los Angeles, agencies such as the Port of Oakland, California, and the New York State Liquor Authority, and urban counties use the company’s solutions to increase transparency and staff efficiency.

Granicus has developed an Internet-based platform and software solution to integrate with the legislative processes of government, helping to capture and distribute internal training or public meeting webcasts live and on-demand. It also helps to digitally manage live public meeting operations and legislative information with greater efficiency.

During any public meeting—for example, city council or board of commissioners meetings, or legislative floor sessions—Granicus clients use its MinutesMaker software or its Open Platform Software Development Kit to integrate the agency’s own legislative information systems in order to digitally capture public meeting activities such as motions, votes, or amendments. Automatic timestamps link streaming audio and video files with agenda items in real time.

The result is a digital repository that Granicus calls an “integrated public record” of audio/video streaming media, minutes, agendas, staff reports, or full bill information. All of the information is cross-linked, searchable by keywords, and available on the client’s website. An application called Granicus MediaManager, which is hosted by Granicus, manages all of the streaming media operations.

When Granicus started providing its streaming solutions, it focused on offering purely hosted services that government entities accessed over the Internet. But that soon proved to be problematic.

“Many government agencies—and local governments in particular—often have problems with their Internet connectivity,” says Tom Spengler, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Granicus. “Some of our clients are small municipalities that have just one DSL connection and no one to manage their IT systems or Internet connections. The big problem that we heard about was about agencies that would simply lose their Internet connection due to, say, a fiber cable being accidently cut or an Internet service provider issue that caused them to go offline. Our customers are often at the mercy of their Internet connection, and if that goes down, then they cannot use a hosted service.”

Solution

To help its customer base increase the effectiveness of their Internet-based communications, and to help boost its own growth, Granicus made a strategic shift in the company’s core offerings. Instead of providing purely hosted services to government agencies, the company created a series of solutions using a software-plus-services approach based on Microsoft® products and technologies. 

The Granicus solutions still use the Internet for delivering information, but also provide software applications that are downloaded and installed on local PCs to manage information, providing government personnel with continued information access even when they temporarily lose an Internet connection or need to work offline. These can help perform tasks such as recording minutes or indexing agenda items against the audio/video stream live during their meeting, or intelligently routing internal users to servers on a network without causing user traffic to slow connection speeds.

“We felt this was the best way to take the network connection problem out of the equation—by providing additional richness and functionality on the user’s PC, yet keep the scalability and flexibility of Web-based applications,” says Javier Muniz, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Granicus.

Granicus created a number of products based on the Software-plus-Services model using Microsoft technology. These include:

Granicus MediaManager, a complete solution for creating, managing, and tracking streaming audio and video broadcasts to the Internet, with the ability to archive them on Granicus databases for future reference and viewing. MediaManager software enables government agency staff members to manage video and audio content of public meetings and other government functions without having to understand the technical complexities of capturing and distributing streaming content to constituents.

Granicus MinutesMaker, which combines minutes-annotation software with streaming-media recording and video-indexing technology. Clerks and secretaries can easily integrate MinutesMaker into their existing legislative workflows. This lets them automate recordkeeping tasks, simplify minutes annotation, and gain time to focus on other high-priority projects. Granicus also offers a Microsoft Word Plug-in for government staff who prefer to edit or format their minutes in their existing word processing application. 

Granicus VoteCast, a touch-based solution that gives voting members the power to view agendas, record their own motions and votes, and interact with the meeting clerk minutes process.

Granicus Training Edition, a Web-based training platform that lets government agencies create, deploy, and track online training at a low cost. Training Edition is an add-on module to the Granicus MediaManager content delivery platform.

Granicus StreamReplicator, which is used by organizations unable to support simultaneous requests for live content. StreamReplicator distributes live streams across an internal network and can use existing multicasting capabilities.

Granicus MediaVault, a hosted service that stores all video from public meetings and staff trainings. Content, including Windows Media® files, is replicated and stored on the network, using XML technology and a peer-to-peer model for synchronizing between the Granicus MediaVault database and local PCs. MediaVault uses MediaManager to track where files are stored and identifies files that need to be synchronized.

The Granicus solutions are built on an array of Microsoft products and technologies, including the Microsoft .NET Framework, the Microsoft Silverlight™ Web browser plugin, the Windows Presentation Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation technologies, Microsoft SQL Server® 2005, Microsoft Office Live Meeting, Windows Media technologies, and Internet Information Services.

Benefits

By creating solutions based on the Software-plus-Services model, Granicus can offer a set of rich solutions that combine the best of both locally installed software and hosted services. This helps government agencies to stream their content and cost-effectively record, manage, and deliver information to their constituents without the cost and overhead of traditional IT systems. It gives them the power to create and modify content on their local PCs, while letting Granicus handle the “heavy lifting” of content storage, file synchronization, and Internet-based delivery. The Microsoft technology used by Granicus also creates a flexible, highly responsive information environment without the connection delays and service interruptions that can affect purely hosted services.

Best of Local and Hosted Software

From both the standpoint of both developers and end users, the Software-plus-Services design approach helped Granicus create solutions that provide the best of both hosted and locally installed software.
“The Software-plus-Services architecture using the Microsoft technologies gives us—and our customers—the best of both worlds,” says Spengler. “When designing the individual solution components, we took and ‘either-or’ approach, depending on what a particular piece of a solution was supposed to do. For example, with video, we felt there had to be distribution capabilities both on the hosted side and on the client side to allow for the greatest flexibility. With Live Meeting, we wanted to implement the scalability of a hosted application to allow large or small groups of users to participate in a meeting.

“At the same time, certain components of a meeting solution are locally installed so they’re not dramatically affected if Internet service goes down during a meeting,” he continues. “What the software-plus services approach does is provide the best features of both hosted and local software, without requiring agencies and municipalities to make large investments in IT personnel and infrastructure.”

Ability to Create, Modify Local Data

Solutions relying exclusively on a hosted services provider not only risk connection issues, but deny users the ability to fully interact with information whenever and wherever they need to, Spengler says.

“Using the Software-plus-Services approach with the Microsoft technologies helped us create solutions that give users the ability to interact with their information even when they are offline,” says Spengler. “It is analogous to the way that Microsoft Office Outlook works. Outlook needs connectivity to provide full functionality such as sending e-mail and calendar invitations that are distributed to multiple users. But when offline, a user can still open Outlook and compose messages, print information, view calendars and more.”

Flexible, Responsive Environment

Basing its Software-plus-Services solutions on the Microsoft platform has helped Granicus deliver software that is flexible and highly responsive to customers—and to the developers working at Granicus.

“From a business perspective, people usually prefer hosted, centralized technology because it is lower maintenance and cost over the long term,” Spengler says. “But in the government sector that we serve, there are conditions and restraints. In addition to the risk of disconnected Internet service, people also need solutions that are highly responsive. When a vote is underway, a delay of a few seconds in capturing information creates problems. The Microsoft technology allowed us to create solutions that are extremely responsive to user input while providing a rich user interface.”

He says that the software-plus-services approach also helps Granicus remain agile with a highly scalable, flexible platform that can be quickly modified to meet customer requests.  “This platform helps us delivery a lot of automation and accuracy for recording and archiving public meetings, with all the reliability and responsiveness of applications that are running locally on the client’s PCs,” says Spengler. “The Microsoft technology and software-plus-services approach helps our customers use webcasts and public meeting management solutions to enhance legislative processes.”

Software + Services

Software-plus-services is an industry shift driven by the fast-growing recognition that combining Internet services with client and server software can deliver exciting new opportunities. Microsoft is dedicated to helping individuals and businesses take advantage of these opportunities. By bringing together the best of both software and services, we maximize capabilities, choice, and flexibility for our customers. The broad software-plus-services approach unites multiple industry phenomena including software as a service, service-oriented development, and the Web 2.0 user experience under a common umbrella.

For more information about software-plus-services, go to: www.microsoft.com/softwareplusservices

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: http://www.microsoft.com/

For more information about Granicus products and services, call (877) 780-4848 or visit the Web site at: http://www.granicus.com/

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