In February 2009, the US Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA)  to;  Create new jobs and save existing ones,  spur economic activity and invest in long-term growth, and foster unprecedented levels of accountability and transparency in government spending.   The ARRA required that a website be created  to "foster greater accountability and transparency in the use of funds made available in this Act.”  Recovery.gov went live on February 17, 2009.   The site's primary mandate was to give taxpayers user-friendly tools to track Recovery funds -- how and where they are spent--- in the form of charts, graphs, and maps that provide national overviews down to specific zip codes. 

The site initially was built using the open-source Drupal content management system, but concerns quickly arose. The government’s content editors couldn’t update the site on their own; they had to go through a webmaster based with the contractor who had built the site. That process could take two weeks to implement minor changes—an unacceptable delay for a site that needed to provide up-to-date information

Original Drupal Site	New SharePoint Site

In addition, Drupal did not go beyond content management to provide other capabilities that the government needed, including dynamic reporting and data visualization, integrated social media, and search capability.  Pretty quickly, the government solicited new bids for the Recovery.gov site. In addition to overcoming the limitations of the first site, they wanted the new Recovery.gov up and running within 10 weeks, to meet fast-approaching deadlines specified in the recovery act.

This time, the recovery act website would be based on Microsoft technologies, including Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and SQL Server 2008 data management software running on the Windows Server 2008 Datacenter operating system. 

Recovery.gov sees millions of visitors each month and was built to support spikes in traffic that would bring millions of visitors an hour. The developers designed the site specifically to support that scalability. For example, they deployed multiple, load-balanced nodes of Office SharePoint Server 2007 for content delivery. Up to 80 percent of the content is cached, making it faster to retrieve.

The developers (Synteractive)  also boosted scalability by hosting this configuration on a cloud computing platform, which provides the computing resources just mentioned as a service over the Internet. Cloud computing gives Recovery.gov access to virtually unlimited aditional resources for future scalability, while the government pays only for the actual share of those resources that it uses at any given time.

See SharePoint it in action at Recovery.gov and read more about the switch from Drupal to SharePoint  here.