Colchester Borough Council

Colchester Borough Council would like to create a mobile application to deliver tasks to a mobile workforce using Microsoft Power Apps. As more and more Councils are adopting Office 365 there is an opportunity to develop an app jointly with other Authorities which would take advantage of users’ existing 365 licences and remove the requirement for 3rd party mobile applications. 

The first phase of the development would provide the app itself and interfaces with both Microsoft Dynamics 365 and SharePoint to provide the back-end database/process engine, but ultimately we would build an open source API for developers to build interfaces with other products or provide the complete package (with SharePoint or dynamics backend) for authorities without the resources to build their own version.

Discovery evidence

A number of Local Authorities are using or looking at mobile applications to provide efficiencies by reducing paper and print, optimising workload amongst staff and providing expedient task delivery to maximise the geographical location of teams in the field. However, Councils have large teams and proprietary mobile applications can be expensive – particularly if supplied on a per user basis. Furthermore, a number of these systems will only run on specific devices. 

Most Local Authorities have mobile teams dealing with street cleaning, fly tipping, enforcement etc so there is commonality in the requirement for a task delivery system. 

The Microsoft stack includes a product – called power apps on which mobile apps can be built and ‘plugged in to’ back office applications. The use of these apps is included with Microsoft’s F1 licence. 

We believe that a mobile task delivery system which is part of the cheapest Microsoft subscription would be attractive to a growing number of LA’s 

Colchester Borough Council have been developing applications using the various products available through the in-house Microsoft Enterprise suite and have a prototype of this product. We have built various council applications on Microsoft Dynamics, including our website and we use SharePoint for internal processes.