Microsoft lends a hand with software projects

By PETER GRIFFIN

Two health boards and Statistics New Zealand are to benefit from a Microsoft scheme to back the development projects of one of its biggest customers - the Government.

As winners in the Microsoft Innovation Centre's third funding round, the Auckland and Northland district health boards and Statistics will each receive software and consultancy services worth between $75,000 and $90,000 for project development.

Naturally, the winning organisations, which were required to be Microsoft licence agreement holders, will employ predominantly Microsoft software in prototypes.

But the Statistics general manager of information management services, Graeme Osborne, said the funding win did not lock the department into going any further than prototype stage with the software giant. He would use the development funding to put together a white paper outlining the department's options, then put out a request for proposal.

"[Microsoft has] a fund that is pointed towards projects of strategic importance to them and government. Even if they build a perfect solution we'll put it aside and see what else is out there."

Statistics' winning project is one that will tackle the complex task of conducting the national Census every five years. It hopes to use the internet for electronic census submissions for the 2006 Census and estimates up to 20 per cent of the 1.5 million households may be able to submit their details online.

"The Census is actually quite simple. It's four A4 sides of paper. The challenge is scaling the system [for the internet]. We want to avoid the dramas of the Qualifications Authority," he said.

The NZQA website last month struggled to keep up with demand as thousands of students repeatedly logged on to check for their exam results. At one stage the site was receiving 180 hits a second.

The Census will be a much bigger deal and need a robust system to be of any use.

Microsoft maintained its focus on the health sector, an obvious area for take-up of the .Net framework.

The Northland District Health Board won with plans for a mobile system equipping community nurses with mail, scheduling and clinical applications while they are on the road.

It would tap into the clinical data repository project sponsored by Northland Health.

The health board's projects manager, Jo Wheat-Connelly, said Sharepoint Portal Server, .Net, InfoPath and SQL Server would possibly be used in the prototype system it is building.

Eventually nurses in the district would send information back to a central database from handheld computers using the GPRS network.

"District health nurses are expected to fill in reams of forms. Generally they come back to the office and do a heck of a lot of paperwork," she said.

Second-time winner, the Auckland District Health Board designed a system for capturing trends in cases at its children's emergency department. Data on attendance figures, referrals, compliance of triage times and diagnoses would be gathered.

Microsoft innovation centre for NZ Governament