Portal Keeps Candidates SafePortal Keeps Candidates Safe

Behind President Bush and Sen. John Kerry's debate at Washington University last week was an intense IT-integration effort, pulling together national, state, and local emergency responders. These responders relied on the real-time flow of data to ensure the only bombs going off in St. Louis were rhetorical.

To do this, the event's incident-command team, comprised of police from St. Louis County and Washington University, firefighters from the city of Clayton, Mo., and agents from the U.S. Secret Service, used a Microsoft SharePoint-based portal modified by service provider Convergence Communications LLC. In its university lecture-hall headquarters, the command team had 25 PCs able to send and receive data over a LAN to as many as 450 police officers positioned across the campus. Five officers normally patrol this same area.

The command team refused to use a Web-based or wireless network. "The bottom line is that we're talking about the protection of the president of the United States," says Nick Gragnini, deputy director of the St. Louis County Police Office of Emergency Management. "We just couldn't take the chance and go out on the Web or use wireless."

The portal let command-center workers exchange instant messages, share data, and have joint access to a checklist of tasks that needed to be completed. If a task wasn't completed on schedule, the task list flashed to alert commanders that there was a problem.

The portal simplified the management of multiple cross-jurisdictional groups. Without it, the command center would have been bombarded with radio systems squawking across as many as eight different frequencies, Gragnini says.

The portal is a prototype of a communication and alert Web portal being developed by the Missouri Department of Homeland Security that's scheduled to go live Nov. 1. The state's $1 million portal, also designed by Convergence on SharePoint, will serve as a central point of communication for first responders throughout the state during emergencies.