EOffice is one of the key IT projects of NIC, aimed at improving internal efficiencies in organization through electronic administration leading to informed and quicker decision making, which in turn results in better public service delivery. It promotes less paper office with greater collaboration and knowledge sharing. During the period of lockdown necessitated by COVID-19, eOffice emerged as a game-changer, by facilitating unhindered work, unfettered and secured access to Government files to officials, that too in the financial year closing period. There is significant rise in use of eOffice and eFiles during this period, as paper-based files can be hosts for corona infection. Moreover, it was difficult to continue to work with traditional paper-based file systems during a complete lockdown state, without significant delays in functioning of any government office. Apart from the fear of COVID-19 infection, two other major factors contributed significantly, towards smooth transition of the Government, from working from office, to working from home. Firstly, most of the Government of India Ministries/Departments, Attached offices, and States with their districts were already working on eOffice and its adoption was on the ascendant. Even several PSUs had also adopted eOffice. Secondly, the availability of interdepartmental file transfers through eOffice.

https://eoffice.gov.in/

• India

The Open Architecture on which eOffice is built, makes it standard reusable product amenable to replication across Governments at central, state, district levels. It is a web-based product that brings together independent functions and systems under single framework. Aspects of extensibility, scalability, security, interoperability and open standards were taken into consideration while defining overall architecture. eOffice is Unicode compliant with localized interface, facilitating to work in local language. Technologies/ICT tools – eOffice is cloud enabled, developed and deployed using Open Source based software namely, PHP & Java, Apache HTTPD, Apache Tomcat, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Kafka, Redis, ActiveMQ, Elastic etc. on Linux based servers ( RHEL/CentOS). It is pertinent to mention that eOffice implementation for Government of India is restricted within NICNET environment only. This is where two enabling technologies played their part in smooth transition to work from home during Covid-19 pandemic. These technologies were; WebVPN solution of NIC for secured access to eOffice and eSign technology for digitally signing eFiles. As soon as lockdown was announced, NIC facilitated Government departments in obtaining WebVPN to enable access of eOffice over secure channel, at any time, and from anywhere. Further, eOffice is eSign enabled, therefore, digital signing of noting and drafts continued seamlessly.