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Microsoft expands its Microsoft 365 Government platform with Teams, Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. Government customers can now benefit from many of the same cloud-based services that have been available to corporate customers for a long time.

Our government agencies have a unique opportunity to have a huge impact on citizens’ lives. An impact that can be accelerated and encouraged by technological innovation. However, the same authorities are challenged to modernise and keep up with the changing technology landscape. At the same time, the costs are reduced. There is also a need for data protection and strict compliance requirements, says Toni Townes-Whitley, president of Microsoft’s US regulated industries division.

Steady technological innovation government

According to Venturebeat, the number of government agencies is not only increasing at Microsoft, but other cloud giants such as Amazon, Google and Oracle are also trying to bind these agencies to themselves. Although the government is very slow to modernise and move services online, the cloud parties argue that government operations will be more efficient if authorities embrace the cloud. In addition, the service to the public could be offered more quickly and more reliably.

To ensure that the government increases its own appeal, the software giant now adds the Office 365-based chat-based collaboration tool Teams to Microsoft 365 Government. A solution competes with Google Hangouts Chat, Facebooks Workplace and Slack.

Business analysis and intelligence tools

Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement will also be added to the government platform. The products are designed to provide government agencies with the same kind of business analysis and intelligence tools that companies use on a large scale. This would allow users to be better understood and would significantly improve the service. For government agencies using Office 365 Threat Intelligence in Government Cloud Community (GCC), new automation features are available. This is a function that helps public IT employees in their fight against the growing number of cyber-attacks.

In addition, the architecture of Microsoft’s mobile Outlook services has been updated to make them more secure.

Power Platform

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it would be giving its Power Platform a significant boost. The platform, which provides a framework for business intelligence and workflow automation, will be central to Redmond’s future strategy. With Power BI, Flow and the PowerApps, the software giant would have a capable business intelligence and automation package in house. Power BI is responsible for the processing and analysis of data, while Flow is a kind of professional variant of IFTTT, which facilitates the automation of tasks and workflows. PowerApps make it possible to create applications without code in a simple way.

Read also: Government continues to digitise with citizen app for social certificates

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.