Welcome to the CSP Blog, the site where we want to share with you our thoughts, ideas and get your feedback on the evolution of t he Platform. As the owner of the project I have been with it since it was known as ‘Digital Town Hall’ and thus am far too close to be impartial any more. One question I would like to answer which has often arisen is just what is it, and where does it fit within Microsoft’s offerings and products. Let me try to explain. The CSP was designed and created to provide a stepping stone for partners and customers in creating Citizen Service Application solutions, using the standard Microsoft stack. So it’s not a regular product like Small Business Server for example, nor is it ‘only a demo’. It’s something between these two points which means that although it will demo well, it also provides a reference architecture for how to correctly design for citizen service scenarios using the Microsoft stack, and this is something there has been plenty of interest in given the wide range of scenarios that governments are faced with today.  In addition to this it provides a foundational MOSS based portal that is an ideal framework for partner ISV applications to be ‘snapped in’, thus providing an extensible foundation that can host Partner scenarios as well as Microsoft only, which is very important in the local  government space.

In this first iteration there is much more that we wanted to include, but time and resource constraints as always means that some things will be added on as we build out and get further feedback. One thing we are looking forward to seeing is the many ISV apps that exist on the stack today come together more using the CSP as a foundation and thus the focus of our work in 2008 will be ensuring that we design a good framework for these solutions.  I look forward to seeing that happen!

Gordon McKenzie