The DGME has set out an ambitious programme to put many public services on-line, with the objective of simplifying and optimizing the way users interact with government at different times in their life. This is the aim behind mon.service-public.fr, a single, personalized point-of-access to public services. Putting these government services on-line involves implementing a generic platform which takes into account the constant evolution of on-line services offerings and responds to extremely demanding constraints in terms of timescales, security and costs.

The new 'on-line services factory' will guarantee this kind of agility for the French government. Bull has been chosen to deliver the contract, and has joined forces with two software publishers to do so: Axway will provide the orchestration and supervision elements, while Québec-based company Alphinat will provide the software that constructs the dialogue with the user.

Bull and its partners have worked together to define the functionality of the new system, which will enable new computerized services to be automatically designed, formalized and put on line. The 'factory' will consist of five functional areas: dialogue and recording of requests, submission of requests, monitoring of requests, supervision and administration.

The solution put forward by Bull is based around a structured and professional approach which capitalizes on existing work, replicates and shares it wherever practicable. It includes:

• A dedicated organisation structure designed to control and optimize the entire, end-to-end lifecycle of creating new on-line services
• An agile process for building the system architecture for each service (using a Service-Oriented Architecture approach), to encourage re-use of services and guarantee the rapid development of new approaches
• The use of tools that are user-friendly, ergonomic and simple to use.

As part of its mission to modernize the way that government operates and is managed, the DGME has launched a vast programme aimed at simplifying administrative processes, for all users of public services. At the heart of this programme, mon.service-public.fr enables users to carry out numerous tasks on-line, monitor the progress of their interactions and save documents published by the government and its partners in a secure area of the site. This means that mon.service-public.fr is an essential tool when it comes to simplifying people's relationships with public services and one of the key points of interaction between government, users and other organisations partnering the State.

This mass-market application - which is destined to receive several tens of millions of hits a year - has to respond to highly exacting requirements in terms of availability, security of exchanges, confidentiality of personal data and robustness.

Within extremely tight timescales of less than five months, Bull implemented a very complex infrastructure including all software systems, networks, security and storage. To meet the extremely high security standards required, Bull divided each platform into VLANs (virtual local area networks) and implemented security mechanisms at each level, based on the use of encryption keys.

The environment has been designed to handle a sharp rise in the number of annual hits and data storage space required: by 2011 these are predicted to reach 64 million a year and 383TB respectively. Bull has joined forces with NetApp to offer an innovative storage solution, with two different levels of architecture depending on how critical the data is, and responding to the demands required for a mass-market Internet application in terms of the amount of data to be stored and how far it evolves. In total, almost 130 servers including over 100 Bull NovaScale machines have been deployed to run the integration, pre-production and production environments.

The application is being hosted and operated at a Bull Data Center in two independent cold sites, running 24x7 with 99.8% availability. Bull has also defined the disaster recovery plan for the system. Finally, the company is providing 24 Mbps Internet bandwidth, utilizing the facilities offered by the numerous operators serving the hosting site, including Agarik, Bull's subsidiary which specializes in hosting critical Web applications.