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.

A revamped version of the Belgian eID website eid.belgium.be was released on 31 January 2012 by the Federal Public Service for ICT (Fedict).

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.

Improving IT applications for the users is the reason most frequently given by German public administrations to move to open source and open standards, according to a migration guide that is about to be published by OSS Kompetenzzentrum, the government's resource centre on open source software.

Since 16 February 2012 citizens have been able to submit online via the eTax website their annual tax returns to the Public Revenue Office (PRO).

On 9 February 2012, the Irish Minister of State with special responsibility for the Office of Public Works (OPW), Brian Hayes TD launched a pilot project on eInvoicing across a number of Government Departments and other public sector bodies.

The Procurement and Purchasing Department of the University of the Basque Country has recently integrated ICT in its procurement procedures.

The Legal, Financial and Administrative Services Agency (Kammarkollegiet, in Swedish) has recently announced that it will provide its customers (public authorities) with a complete eProcurement solution as from the autumn of 2012.

Following a recent agreement between the Ministry of the Interior and Czech Post, as from April 2012 the cost of sending a single message to a Data Box will drop from CZK 15.04 without VAT (approx. €0.59) to CZK 11.68 without VAT (approx. €0.46). This is expected to save the government CZK 20 million (approx €790 600) a year.

The Belgian Federal Agency for Administrative Simplification (ASA/DAV) recently deployed a Public Sector Information (PSI) portal.

On 24 January 2012, the Spanish website 'Datos.gob.es' received the LAPSI Award for the most user friendly public sector information (PSI) portal design in the EU.

On 6 January 2012, the Interoperability
Solutions for European Public Administrations (ISA) programme of the European Commission launched the public review of the Asset Description Metadata Schema (ADMS). The review will last until 6 February 2012 (inclusive).

The beta version of 'Dados.gov', a Portuguese open government platform which makes a wide range of data available to the general public, was launched on 24 November 2011.

Public administrations should, when building their own applications, collaborate in creating communities of open source developers, recommends Miguel Jaque Barbero, the managing director of Cenatic, during the workshop organised by the European Commission's ISA Programme on 12 January 2012 in the context of the Open Source World Conference.

Britt Inger Kolset, coordinator for SuksIt, an IT project by seven municipalities in the Kongsberg region in Norway, supports that hosted collections of open source IT applications will make it easier for public administrations to use this type of software.