The Finnish Parliament launched a revised news service in early February. The service clearly improves the Parliament’s external communications making it more versatile and efficient. The platform and design for the news service was provided by Teamware Group, specialist in public sector solutions. This service is part of a larger pilot project in which the Parliament has been looking for a unified web service platform and publishing system for its different units.

The Finnish Parliament is a trailblazer in information technology issues. In the late 1980's all MP's had access to e-mail through their personal computers. A comprehensive Internet service was launched in 1995, and during year 2000 the SGML standard for defining and representing documents in an application-independent form was introduced. In the process of updating its IT system to be year 2000 compliant, the Teamware Office groupware system was taken into use.

The news service, Uutisruutu, improves communications services to citizens and the Parliament's different interest groups. The visitor quickly gets a good picture of the ongoing important developments in parliamentary and legislative work. In addition to the news flow, the service provides an easy-to-use news archive with efficient search functionality. Moreover, the visitor can subscribe to the news service and receive notifications of new press releases and direct links to them. The news service is available in Finnish and Swedish. From a technical point of view, it was essential that the service support different document standards, and also that it be accessible to the visually impaired. Insofar as the content management was concerned, one of the main objectives was to speed up working processes, and also to support updating of ready-made content in the system and managing images independently without specific technical skills.

The Parliament has been running three simultaneous projects where web services have been renewed with solutions provided by Teamware. The platform in all these projects is Teamware Pl@za®.

Late last year the Social Democratic Parliamentary Group launched their new web service www.eduskunta.fi/sdp. The main target groups for the Internet service are the media, the constituency, pupils and students. In addition, the web site is an important internal communications tool for the Parliamentary Group. The aim of the service is to present the parliamentary work of the Social Democratic Party, inform interest groups of the party's achievements in Parliament, as well as offer a direct and almost real time connection to citizens.

In March, a new web site will be opened for the Parliamentary Ombudsman's office. A new visual image has been created for this web site and more content will be provided. The intention is to provide information easier to the different user groups.

All of these projects are part of a larger entity, which aims at unifying the Finnish Parliament's web services and improving publishing of information. In the future, the Parliament is planning on renewing its public Internet site as well as the internal intranet system.