eAdministration means more and more electronic document exchanges between administrations. Many solutions exist but are seldom interoperable or reusable. Presto is a protocol aimed at promoting international standards used in private sector for eAdministration. By defining lightweight multi technological standard to achieve interoperability in a multi technological context, Presto benefits both to administration and to solution vendors. Presto defines a standard way to transfer any type of documents between different administration applications. It insures reliability of transmission as well as integrity and confidentiality. Presto is the electronic equivalent of a postal envelope with proof of delivery

Policy Context

Presto is part of the national effort to define an interoperability framework in France including central administration and local authorities. This national effort promotes the use of open international standards making adoption in other context easy. The governance of this interoperability framework is set by law

Description of target users and groups

Presto is a standard defined for eAdministration information systems. Any administration involved in eAdministration development is concerned: local authorities (36000), regional authorities (100 regions) and central administration

Description of the way to implement the initiative

The partnership for Presto is original and is a success key factor. The working group was composed of public administrations (mainly ministries like transport and justice) and private sector companies (mainly editors like Microsoft, SUN, Away,WSO2). The role of the administration group was to challenge the editor group into honing their solutions to achieve interoperability through the use of standards. Interoperability was demonstrated through pilot implementations. This work benefited for both as software companies could natively integrate end users needs into their solutions and administrations were assured of technological independence and interoperability Multi-channel issues: Presto is a Web Service profile. It applies to application to application communication over a web service channel

Main results, benefits and impacts

- Innovation: eAdministration efforts are generally focused on providing services to users (citizens, enterprises, etc.). Presto is aimed at eAdministration builders. Simply requiring Presto compliance insures interoperability or electronic document transfer between administration applications. Since Presto compliance is equivalent to compliance to international standards largely adopted by software industry, many applications are de facto eligible

Return on investment

Return on investment: Not applicable / Not available

Track record of sharing

Initially Presto was considered as a national middleware project. Since it is entirely based on open international standards, convergence between Presto and other European countries occurs. Former members of eLink are now interested in Presto and Germany and France decided to define a common standard for both countries making transborder exchanges easier. France is also working for convergence with international standards such as Health standards to manage medical files (more information on eHealth protocol IHE-XDS are available at http://www.ihe.net )

Lessons learnt

The major lessons to learn from this project are governance, partnership and change management. Presto is part of a larger project to insure eAdministration development coordination federating French administrations efforts. As any successful standard, Presto was not defined by administrations alone or public sector alone but by a partnership between users of standards (administrations) and makers (software companies). Finally, the availability of solutions on as many technologies as possible (Java, Microsoft, C++ even PHP interface) is a success key, making integration of solution less intrusive Scope: Local (city or municipality), National, Regional (sub-national)