SUNNYVALE, GOVPARTNER INTRODUCE NEW PERMITPARTNER™ FEATURES

SAN DIEGO, CA, May 22, 2002 -- The City of Sunnyvale, CA has become the first City in the country to offer a full range of building services online at www.e-onestop.net. Sunnyvale Chief Building Official Ali Fatapour, and Jon Rodriguez, President of GovPartner, made the announcement.

Dubbed 'E-Onestop,' these advanced online services range from scheduling building inspections and obtaining minor building permits, to monitoring the status of building plan checks and obtaining permit histories for planning and building permits. The new features enhance PermitPartner™, an online permitting system offered by GovPartner (http://www.govpartner.com) that is available to public agencies and municipalities nationwide.

PermitPartner™ was originally developed in a Silicon Valley partnership with the City of Sunnyvale, City of Mountain View, Microsoft ® Corporation, and Joint Venture: Silicon Valley. Sunnyvale formed a public/private e-Government partnership with GovPartner granting exclusive license to the software. The online permitting system allows homeowners, contractors and utility companies to complete and submit permit applications, pay for permits, schedule inspections and receive their permits over the Internet.

Since 1997, Sunnyvale has been managing its permitting, planning and code enforcement process through CommunityDevelopmentPartner™, an internal management system originally developed by the City. CommunityDevelopmentPartner was built with links to a GIS system, and is also linked to PermitPartner to allow for a seamless flow of information from the City's web site to the internal system used daily by Fatapour and his staff.

While PermitPartner has won awards for its real-time verification of addresses, inspector availability and 'shopping cart' feature allowing for multiple permits at one address or one permit type for multiple addresses, the system was previously used only to process simple permits (typically about half of all permit types).

The following three new features are now available online:

E-Inspection Scheduling (www.e-permits.net/einspections): Allows applicants to schedule building inspections for any type of permit online.

E-Permit Histories (www.e-permits.net/ehistories): Allows citizens, real estate agents, and prospective homebuyers to review the permit history of a given property. According to Fatapour, this permit history feature has proven especially popular.

"We have online permit records going back to the 1950s so E-Permit Histories is very useful for people who want to upgrade buildings, do tenant/seismic improvements, determine what building codes were used, and more," he said.

E-Plan Check (www.e-permits.net/eplancheck): Allows permit applicants to view the status and comments for all projects involving a plan check - anytime/anywhere.

Fatapour added that the new features further encourage people to obtain permits online. "The number of permits handled online in Sunnyvale, for example, continues to increase dramatically every few months," he said. "Users are finding that these additional new online features may save them up to a half day in both travel and counter time."

About the City of Sunnyvale

The City of Sunnyvale, with a population of 131,000, is located in the heart of Silicon Valley in Santa Clara County. Sunnyvale was one of the first cities in the nation to offer online permitting capabilities through in-house software. With an Information Technology Department of 30 skilled professionals, Sunnyvale is a leader in both technology development and progressive municipal solutions.

About GovPartner

GovPartner is a leading provider of e-Government solutions for cities, counties and special district government agencies. An affiliate company of Berryman & Henigar, Inc., GovPartner also works in partnership with the City of Sunnyvale and Microsoft to develop and implement cost-effective, long-term e-Government solutions. Among GovPartner's offerings are various Web-enabled software applications, including PermitPartner™ (online permitting), RequestPartner™ (online service requests) and ReservePartner™ (online parks and recreation) - all available through a hosted model. GovPartner also provides a powerful workflow management system, CommunityDevelopmentPartner™, which interacts with the online transactional systems. For more information, please call 888.256.5777 or visit www.govpartner.com.

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