Microsoft Office SystemCustomer Solution Case Study

Law Enforcement Agency Improves Incident Management with Easy-to-Use

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Government—Local, law enforcement

Customer ProfileThe Tampa Police Department works with the community to reduce crime and enhance the quality of life in Tampa, Florida. It has 1,000 police officers and 350 administrative employees.

Business SituationThe Tampa Police Department’s joint activities within the jurisdiction of the Tampa Bay Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) required a Web-based, multi-agency collaboration portal.

SolutionTampa Bay UASI chose E•SPONDER, a customizable Office Business Application solution that is built on Microsoft® Office programs and offers easy-to-use information management capabilities.

Benefits Familiar tools reduce learning

curve Easy information access enables

situational awareness Built-in flexibility for quick

“Based on Microsoft Office technologies, E•SPONDER proved itself as the perfect solution for multi-agency collaboration… [W]e are confident that E•SPONDER will work for us during a real emergency.” Major John Bennett, Commander, Special Operations Division, Tampa Police

Early in the year, the Tampa Police Department, along with other law enforcement agencies and first responders, provides security for a series of public events that culminates with the Gasparilla parade. It needed a collaboration solution to coordinate multi-agency event management and selected E•SPONDER, an Office Business Application (OBA) that allows users to interact with a Web-based collaboration portal using products from the 2007 Microsoft® Office system. With virtually no training, personnel used the OBA solution to collect and share information generated before, during, and after the Gasparilla parade from officers on the ground and in command centers. Using familiar Microsoft Office programs, personnel gained easy access to real-time event information for quick decisions that better ensure public safety at the parade, and, later, for improved after-action reporting.

SituationAs tourists flock to Tampa, Florida, for the special-event season, the influx of people generates a host of security coordination challenges for the Tampa Police Department. As the largest event of the season, the Gasparilla parade challenges even the finest crime prevention and public safety departments. The annual, city-wide party has been going on for more than 100 years and attracts a growing number of attendees every year. During the weekend of the parade, more than half a million revelers re-enact a mock pirate invasion of the city. A flotilla of boats follows a pirate ship that docks at the convention center, where the Mayor hands over the keys of the city to the pirates. The festivities continue with a parade in which more than 100 floats wind their way along a 3.5 mile route through residential and commercial neighborhoods in Tampa.

Coordinating First RespondersFor the Tampa Police Department, the Gasparilla parade provided ample opportunities to try out a new technology solution to coordinate the efforts of first responders, law-enforcement agencies, and other groups that manage public events. The department’s management reasoned that putting a multi-agency, first-responder collaboration solution through its paces during the Gasparilla parade would indicate how well the solution would perform during an unplanned emergency, such as a hurricane.

“Imagine the challenges of ensuring public safety with more than 400,000 people watching the parade,” says Major John Bennett, Commander of the Special Operations Division in the Tampa Police Department. “During that day, we are responsible for homeland security duties and for maintaining crowd control and public safety across the entire city. We have marine patrols along the waterways and helicopters in the air. We have 1,200 officers on the ground working with emergency medical crews, the fire department, highway and traffic patrol officers, public works officials, and a host of other law enforcement agencies from the surrounding counties.”

During the Gasparilla parade, there are five command posts manned by personnel from 18 agencies and organizations, including the Event Operations Center, which handles medical emergency dispatches, and the Situational Awareness Room, where Corporal Doug Pasley, a 21-year veteran of the Tampa Police Department monitors events as they come in from the field. Keeping Bennett up to date in the Command Center is crucial; therefore, the need for real-time communications is evident.

Yet, the coordination between agencies remained a significant challenge. Much of the communication and many of the procedures required to effectively manage the Gasparilla parade were performed manually and documented

“Anyone that uses Microsoft Office on a daily basis can become a power user in E•SPONDER in a matter of minutes.”

Corporal Doug Pasley, Threat and Risk Manager, Tampa Bay Urban Area Risk Initiative

on paper. “We started out the event with huge binders full of officers’ assignments and planned events,” confirms Pasley. “With the 50 or 60 events relayed via radio every hour, the paperwork in the command posts stacks up quickly. Sometimes, my paper log could be two hours behind. With this situation, we could only be reactive. If we had a real-time view of the proceedings then we could be more proactive in diffusing potentially dangerous situations.”

Looking for Collaboration Technology Tools The Tampa Police Department has always worked closely with community agencies and other law enforcement, emergency management, and public health and safety organizations. Recently, these organizations joined forces to become the Tampa Bay Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) region. The Tampa Bay UASI advocated for and received federally-funded security grants to purchase anti-terrorist and disaster response technologies.

According to Pasley, who is also the Threat and Risk Manager for Tampa Bay UASI, the organization was looking for technology with an intuitive graphic user interface (GUI) and a short learning curve. “Any tool we invested in would be used on a daily basis, and shared among different departments and organiza-tions,” he says. “We don’t have a lot of extra time to learn new solutions or struggle with unfamiliar user interfaces, especially during hurricane

season. We wanted an easy-to-use solution that would allow multiple agencies to collaborate on the organization and management of any kind of event, planned or unplanned, as well as on the reporting that we use to evaluate and improve our performance after an event. For emergency situations where people’s lives could be at stake, it was essential that our collaboration solution be reliable and quickly deployable.”

Administration BottlenecksTampa Bay UASI wasn’t just looking for a communication tool that it could use for individual events, it also wanted a full-time collaboration portal for ongoing administration and planning activities. A major goal for the new collaboration solution was to help the organization comply with National Incident Management System (NIMS) planning guidelines. For the Gasparilla parade weekend alone, more than 50 agencies spent 4 months planning and allocating resources. This involved printing and cutting out an officer’s assignment and attaching it to an assignment sheet, one for each of the approximately 1,000 officers on duty. “It was archaic and time consuming,” recalls Pasley. “We had great big binders that we used year after year. Sometimes a street would change and an officer would get an assignment for a location that no longer existed.”

After the event, an equally daunting task lay ahead in developing an after-action review. With incident

information collected in paper binders and in different spreadsheets from different agencies, it took too long to sift through the information to assess the event or provide accurate costing information to the city of Tampa for budgeting purposes.

“Post-event tracking is critical in evaluating where you made the best decisions, and where you could improve,” says Bennett. “Overall, we felt that Gasparilla would provide a great proof of concept for a collaboration tool for daily planning and executing the management of public events or disasters.”

SolutionTampa Bay UASI chose E•SPONDER, developed by Microsoft® Certified Partner, Convergence Communications. E•SPONDER is an Office Business Application (OBA) built using products from the 2003 Microsoft Office System, with Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 forming a Web browser–based collaboration environment. Today, a new version of E•SPONDER built on the 2007 Microsoft Office system and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, is available and Tampa Bay UASI has plans to upgrade to this version in September 2007.

Office Business Applications Office Business Applications are a new breed of easily customizable, collaborative solutions that address business challenges by using familiar Microsoft Office servers, clients, and

tools. As an OBA, E•SPONDER is a collaboration portal that requires only an Internet connection and a Web browser to access. Tampa Police Department employees and other TAMPA Bay UASI members can enter, share, and access operational information on the portal via a graphical interface that offers the familiar look and feel of the Microsoft Office system programs. The portal integrates area law enforcement agencies, fire and rescue departments, and emergency services all in a single communication and collaboration environment. Anyone working with E•SPONDER can write documents using Microsoft Office Word, or analyze data with the Microsoft Office Excel® spreadsheet software, or fill out forms using the Microsoft Office InfoPath® information gathering program.

“I’m impressed with the vision Microsoft has around developing the Office system as an application platform to create business applications using tools people normally associate with desktop use only,” says Rob Wolf, Chief Executive Officer and President of Convergence Communications. “For many of our law enforcement, sheriff department, and emergency management agency customers, a familiar interface is very important. That’s why we built this OBA based on Microsoft Office system technologies, which enable users to input information using Word, Excel, or [Office] Outlook programs.”

“With events of this magnitude, the goal is to have perfect situational awareness, where everyone is aware of everyone else’s movements…. Using E•SPONDER we are able to make that goal a reality.”Major John Bennett, Commander, Special Operations Division, Tampa

The Tampa Police Department worked closely with Convergence Communications to customize E·•SPONDER to help meet Tampa Bay UASI’s needs. Pasley acts as program manager for E•SPONDER and is in daily contact with the team from Convergence Communications to guide the project’s development in accordance with NIMS guidelines. Last year, the Tampa Police Department first used this OBA for after-action reporting following the Gasparilla parade in 2006. For the 2007 parade, the Tampa Police Department used the solution to plan and execute the event as well.

E•SPONDER in ActionDuring Gasparilla festivities in 2007, participating agencies and personnel used the OBA to track preplanned incidents like parade start times and checkpoints, road closures, personnel assignments, and security sweeps, as well as unplanned events, like arrests and citations, medical emergencies, parking tickets, and traffic infractions. Most of the data entered into the portal comes from personnel and dispatchers in 911 centers and command posts. Officers on the ground used Windows Mobile® powered Cingular Pocket PCs to enter and view data, and emergency management personnel can view data on laptops or in police cruisers equipped with a computer and Internet access. Different types of Internet connectivity in use during the event included Sprint and Verizon Evolution Data Optimized (EVDO) PC cards, Cingular EDGE PC cards,

satellite connectivity provided by the U.S. Navy, DSL services, and Tampa’s internal network.

BenefitsSo far, E•SPONDER has proved itself as a flexible OBA communication application that requires virtually no training, yet enables Tampa Bay UASI and the Tampa Police Department to:

Collaborate during daily activities and event planning.

Coordinate command and control during events and incidents.

Review and evaluate their performances.

For each of these scenarios, Tampa Police Department employees and UASI members are benefiting from:

Familiar tools and a GUI for quick mobilization.

Easy access to information for real-time situational awareness.

Built-in flexibility for quick decisions.

Improved reporting for better operational analysis.

Tampa Police Department employees have already used E•SPONDER to quickly access information and to collaborate more efficiently to improve teamwork, which is the essence of multi-agency productivity. On a daily basis this could mean saving time by sharing documents virtually instead of in face-to-face meetings. During an emergency in the field, better teamwork can mean lives saved.

“Based on Microsoft Office technologies, E•SPONDER proved itself as the perfect solution for multi-agency collaboration,” says Bennett. “It performed well for Gasparilla, Tampa’s biggest event. Now we are confident that E•SPONDER will work for us during a real emergency. ”

Eliminating the Learning CurveBecause this OBA is built on Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003, which offers a familiar Microsoft Office interface, users require very little training, saving time and money for the Tampa Police Department. “All you need to know is how to edit, file, save, and print to work with E•SPONDER,” says Bennett. “People are up and running with this system in a matter of minutes. That was our number one requirement, to be able to deploy quickly in the field. For Gasparilla, we mobilized a group of officers in a park, handed out the PDAs, gave them a five-minute briefing, and they went on duty. It was as simple as that.”

Pasley wanted to use the OBA to more accurately tally arrest numbers during the Gasparilla parade. Usually, arrested persons are held in a transport wagon and taken as a group to booking at the jail. However, the occasional unruly prisoner would be immediately transported to the jail in a cruiser. “Because we manually tracked arrests by counting the prisoners in the wagon, these individuals would be missed,” recalls Pasley. “So I trained the booking clerk

in the jail to enter the arrests directly in E•SPONDER. It took less than five minutes. Anyone that uses Microsoft Office on a daily basis can become a power user in E•SPONDER in a matter of minutes.”

Pasley also uses the collaboration tool for daily planning and committee work and reports the same ease of use is helping with user adoption. The easier the tool is to learn, the more accustomed police personnel will be to the OBA in the event of an emer-gency, which means more efficient mobilization. “We still use Word, [Office] PowerPoint®, and Excel to enter, present and manipulate data,” says Pasley. “Our goal is to get to where if there is a major incident on the street, a squad could mobilize quickly to handle the event. With E•SPONDER, it’s easy to see a sergeant getting set up to start tracking the event in minutes.”

Delivering Perfect Situational AwarenessUsing a single collaboration portal during the Gasparilla parade meant that Tampa Police Department personnel and a host of other agencies could, for the first time, stay up to date with both planned and unplanned events as they unfolded in the field. E•SPONDER enabled multiple agencies to use familiar desktop tools to access, share, and analyze unstructured data collected during the day. Instead of sifting through many large binders of printed planning and assignment materials, a supervisor can find out where an

officer is posted within seconds by looking in E•SPONDER. Pasley uses the OBA to monitor the stream of information coming from the field into the situational awareness room. “Now my reports to Major Bennett are more accurate and timely, so he’s better informed and can quickly make decisions about how to re-allocate resources to hot spots.”

“With events of this magnitude, the goal is to have perfect situational awareness, where everyone is aware of everyone else’s movements,” says Bennett. “It’s not just about sharing the same radio frequency; it’s about everyone having all the resource allocations and management plans, and everyone seeing the unexpected events like arrests and medical emergencies so we are all on the same page in real time to make the best decisions as events unfold. Using E•SPONDER we are able to make that goal a reality.”

Built-In FlexibilityE•SPONDER’s ease of use extends to the solution’s inherent flexibility: a key feature for a planning tool used by many agencies that are monitoring public events or managing emergencies where everyone has come to expect the unexpected. While Tampa Police Department personnel can easily plan for different events using templates that are customizable in Office SharePoint Server 2007, during the event itself, the intuitive, easily navigable portal lends itself to instant modification to accommodate new developments.

“All plans look perfect on paper, but we know better. One of the key benefits of the portal is to be on-the-fly flexible,” confirms Bennett. “If I come in the command center and want to investigate reports of under-age drinking going on in people’s yards behind the parade line, my officers can immediately tweak the solution and suddenly I have the information I need in a familiar Excel format that’s easy to read.”

Improved Reporting All the data entered into the OBA before, during, and after an event like the Gasparilla parade becomes a rich digital repository of information that Tampa Police Department management can easily access for better reporting and after-action reviews. Personnel are using the OBA to respond to media requests for information during an event, and they are using Word or Excel to create professional-looking reports that provide the city of Tampa with accurate cost figures and resource requirements so it can plan better for next year.

“Instead of sifting through mountains of paper and trying to remember what happened on the weekend of the parade, E•SPONDER basically gives us one-button reporting,” confirms Pasley. “And because during the planning stage we have entered all the officers’ assignments into E•SPONDER, we can print out a more professional-looking assignment sheet that gives each officer better

information about his duties on that day. What we are producing today with E•SPONDER and Microsoft Office programs is all now in accordance to NIMS criteria. And if there is a hurricane, we will be there with E•SPONDER to manage the event and produce reports in a timely manner so the city will be reimbursed quickly for paid overtime and other unexpected costs.”

“When we look at the benefits of E•SPONDER, we see that they reach far beyond law enforcement,” concludes Bennett. “It’s the holistic capabilities that come from something as simple as being able to easily collect and use information to get the big picture: national security, city government, partnerships with other agencies, resource allocation, budgeting, and future planning. In the field and in the office, we are using E•SPONDER to enhance our operations in a way that goes beyond our everyday duties to keep improving that big picture.”

Microsoft Office SystemThe Microsoft Office system is the business world’s chosen environment for information work, providing the programs, servers, and services that help you succeed by transforming information into impact.

For more information about the Microsoft Office system, go to: www.microsoft.com/office

For More InformationFor 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: www.microsoft.com

For more information about Convergence Communications products and services, call (314) 686-4100 or visit the Web site at: www.convergence-comm.com

For more information about Tampa Police Department products and services, call (813) 276-3200 or visit the Web site at: www.tampagov.net/dept_police/

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published September 2007

Software and Services Microsoft Office

− Microsoft Office Professional 2007

− Microsoft Office Excel 2007− Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007− Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007− Microsoft Office SharePoint

Server 2007

− Microsoft Office Word 2007− Microsoft Office Excel 2003− Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003

Partner Convergence Communications