Three IT staffers of the Province of Luxembourg in Belgium are implementing their own telephone system, having learned the ropes from an open source telephony firm. The Province is freeing itself of vendor lock-in, replacing its proprietary telephone system with Linux-based Asterisk telephone services.

The Steering Committee of the Swiss eGovernment programme has approved the first phase of the eGovernment action plan which promotes specific projects, from the geographic map of Swiss eGovernment to procedures for filing tax returns or notifying a change of address.

18 Directorate-Generals of the European Commission, Executive Agencies and Institutions recently replaced the paper invoicing process by electronic means, namely e-PRIOR. The change was implemented in the invoicing process with two of DIGIT’s major IT market procedures’ contractors, procurers of the ESP DESIS II and ITSS II procedures. 

Tests performed in April 2012 showed that DIGIT and Difi were able to seamlessly exchange electronic invoices without any need of adapting their information systems. Interoperability was the result of the adoption of Open Standards and the creation of implicit agreements, which work across borders, at organisational, semantic and technical levels.

Several organisations in favour of open standards, free and open source software believe that the Government of the United Kingdom should quickly start implementing its open standards policy. They insist that the Government must leverage truly open innovative technologies to achieve long term savings.

Following a related ministerial decision in December 2011, the Hungarian public administration, as of April 2012, was to use open document standards for all electronic documents; all public organisations were also encouraged to move to open source office tools.

All Portuguese public administrations must consider using open source for their office suites, email, web sites, document management and IT system management. Increasing this type of software is part of a major IT overhaul that was made public on 21 March 2012.

In March 2012, the Pan European Public Procurement OnLine project (PEPPOL) Governing Board agreed on establishing the OpenPEPPOL association, as part of a long-term sustainability roadmap.

Lower costs of procurement and freedom from IT vendor lock-in are the two main benefits from using free and open source software, concludes a survey conducted among public administrations in Europe, published on 28 March 2012.

Public administrations in Iceland are increasing their use of free and open source software. The country's Government recently launched a one year migration project for all of its public institutions.

Lanbide, the regional employment agency of the Basque Country, has recently joined the Buyer Profile on the Basque eProcurement Platform, thus following suit to the Basque Government and other contracting authorities.

Beginning this month (April 2012), providers interested in public procurement will be able to submit their tenders in electronic format via Belgium's federal eTendering platform.

Version 1.3 of Open e-PRIOR, the open-source eProcurement platform, has been published on Joinup.eu, a collaborative platform created by the European Commission.

TenderNed, the national system for public eProcurement in the Netherlands, is now one step closer to becoming the central hub for all public procurement, following the passing of the Public Procurement bill (Aanbestedingswet, in Dutch) by the Lower House of parliament on 14

The Pilot Implementation and Support Unit (ISU) of the Pan European Public Procurement OnLine project (PEPPOL) has been established as a dedicated, professional support team aiming to assist those who are already implementing PEPPOL and running pilots, as well as those who are willing to join.