Public Sector

This article is mainly about the UK government and public sector however most other countries have similiar regulations and frameworks.

Accessibility

The Cabinet Office guidelines are that all government web systems should be accessible to users with disabilities or who are using non-standard equipment. The requirement is to be rated A under the Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines. mailmanager 2.1 exceeds this standard and is rated Double A.

The US Government has law that applies to all Federal agencies requiring them to make their technology accessible to people with disabilities. More details are at http://www.section508.gov. mailmanager 2.1 complies with Section 508.

e-GIF

It is mandatory that all new government systems involving communication between UK Government and citizens, business and other oraganisations comply with the e-Government Interoperability Framework (e-GIF) specifications and policies.

mailmanager uses the e-Government Metadata Framework so that all of the email in the system can be accessed by other systems. For example, an Enterprise Search Application would be able to search through email using the same metadata as applies to all of the other compliant systems.

Open Source

The UK Government has an Open Source policy available from GovTalk. The policy was written in support of the European Commission's initiative to promote the use of open source software in the public sector. Andrew Veitch, CEO of Logicalware, was one of the people who took part in the consultation which led to this policy document.

Logicalware is a member of the Open Source Consortium which can be helpful during the procurement process.

Freedom of Information Act (FOI)

The Freedom of Information Act (FOI) and the Environmental Information Regulations (EIR) both allow Requests for Information (RFI) to be made through email. mailmanager is useful for dealing with these RFIs.

Additionally, when responding to RFIs the mailmanager system can be useful for retrieving email relating to a particular subject.

Evaluation

The National Computer Centre has a test lab which will evaluate Open Source software applications such as mailmanager to assess their suitability for service delivery. The assessment service is free for UK Local Authorities and can be used by other parts of the public sector too. More details are available from the NCC.