The study investigates the state of play of Business to Government (B2G) eInvoicing in public procurement across different levels of administrations in European countries. This includes an analysis of the eInvoicing legal landscape, the standards in use and the platforms used to support eInvoicing in public procurement. It explains the measures that are, or could be, provided by the European Commission to support European countries to comply with the eInvoicing Directive.
In case you do not have time to read the whole study, 13 high-level 'Country Sheets' have been produced from its findings, which contain national information about eInvoicing. Please feel free to reuse and share. Please do not hesitate to contact the CEF Building Blocks if you have any comments or would like to create one for your country, if it is not among those available.
2016 was a big year for European digital public services! From all those working to Connect Europe digitally, we wanted to say thank you to everyone who got involved!
Let's make 2017 even bigger!
To see our year in review message, click on the image above or here to see the story of 2016.
The latest quarterly figures about the CEF building blocks show that their adoption is gaining momentum. These figures can be consulted directly on the CEF Dashboard.
This developing trend is confirmed both in terms of "deployment" as of "use" of the CEF building blocks with the deployment of 147 CEF eDelivery access points that allowed the exchange of over 8 million documents during the 3rd quarter of 2016 alone.
The latest addition to CEF eDelivery family is the EU-CEG project, which has thus far led to the deployment of 14 new CEF eDelivery access points to facilitate reporting on Tobacco products in the context of the Tobacco Products Directive (2014/40/EU).
More projects have taken their first steps towards reusing CEF eDelivery. You can monitor this progress directly via the CEF Reuse Watch.
The European Commission updates the CEF Dashboard on a quarterly basis with new data and features to improve the visibility on the progress made by the DSIs and enhance transparency.
Supported by the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF), the 2016-3 CEF Telecom calls closed on 15 December. The Innovation and Networks Executive Agency (INEA) received 28 project proposals in total for CEF eTranslation and CEF eInvoicing.
Following the submission of the project proposals, INEA, supported by external experts, will check the admissibility and eligibility of the project proposals. The proposals will then be evaluated against the specific award criteria of the calls. The European Commission will announce the final results by May 2017.
The grant funding supports the roll-out of the CEF building blocks, basic capabilities that can be used to facilitate the delivery of digital public services across borders, digitally connecting Europe.
For more information on grant funding provided by the Connecting Europe Facility and the CEF building blocks, visit CEF Digital 2018, or contact INEA directly.
Looking for partners for your CEF Digital 2018 consortium? Check out the dedicated LinkedIn group
Endorsement of eIDAS Technical Specifications v. 1.1 under Regulation (EU) 910/2014 of the European Parliament and of the Council on electronic identification and trust services for electronic transactions in the internal market.
The CEF eID team is pleased to announce the endorsement of the updated version of technical specifications for the eIDAS interoperability framework (v. 1.1) by Opinion No. 2/2016 of the Cooperation Network – a structure where Member States cooperate to achieve interoperability and security of their eID schemes – on 16 December 2016.
The adoption of technical specifications is foreseen by the Regulation (EU) No 910/2014 on electronic identification and trust services for electronic transactions in the internal market and article 12 of the implementing regulation No 2015/1501 creating the platform enabling practical connectivity between eID means from different Member States to foster interoperability.
These specifications have been developed in collaboration with the Member States’ representatives of the technical sub-committee of the eIDAS Expert Group. The Commission facilitated the discussions and supported the process notably by providing a sample implementation of the technical specifications which Member States were free to adopt as an "off the shelf" implementation.
The specifications posted here as version 1.1 represent a stable eIDAS compliant set of technical specifications which Member States can use if they are providing their own implementation. Only the eIDAS Message Format and eIDAS SAML Attribute Profile have been updated compared to the previous version 1.0 (Opinion No. 1/2016 from 26 January 2016).
These technical specifications will be subject to further development in the normal course of events and any subsequent changes will form part of the timed release management process.
The Version 1.1 of the technical specifications consists of four separate documents, each concerning a specific area. Please follow the link to download the documents.
We are happy to announce that the new and extended version of the CEF eDelivery self-assessment tool is now available on the CEF Digital 2018 website.
The CEF eDelivery self-assessment tool is an important first step for your project to discover and reuse CEF eDelivery. By completing the survey and assigning scores to your relevant requirements, your requirements will be assessed and mapped to our CEF eDelivery Service Offering. As a result, the tool indicates what goals and potential value you can achieve by re-using eDelivery, and furthermore, which services of the CEF eDelivery Service Offering will be your key enablers to do so.
CEF eDelivery helps public administrations and businesses (indirectly citizens) to set-up and participate in Message Exchange Infrastructures, which facilitate the exchange of electronic data and documents in a reliable and trusted way. This help comes in the form of grants and the CEF eDelivery Service Offering. Next to the specifications and sample software, the CEF eDelivery Service Offering includes testing services, training, deployment support, a helpdesk and onboarding services.
By defining the business requirements for your Message Exchange Infrastructure, the CEF eDelivery self-assessment tool helps you to understand how the CEF eDelivery services can help you deliver your project faster and at a lower cost.
What’s new? Increasing the interoperability, security, scalability, performance and legal assurance of your Message Exchange Infrastructure. The business requirements for Message Exchange Infrastructures can be grouped into four goals. These goals provide the motivation for the re-use of CEF eDelivery.
Interoperability: CEF eDelivery implements standardised message exchange protocols to enable the exchange of data and documents between information systems that were developed independently form each other.
Security: CEF eDelivery implements security controls to ascertain that your messages cannot be modified (integrity) or intercepted (confidentiality) during the exchange and that the origin and destination of the data and documents are trustworthy.
Scalability and performance: CEF eDelivery can easily be extended to add new nodes to the message exchange network. It allows to exchanging an unlimited number of data files and documents and can handle varying messaging loads throughout the hour, day, etc.
Legal assurance and accountability: CEF eDelivery provides guarantee that data and documents are delivered once and only once (retries, receipts, duplicate elimination) and are delivered even if sent to temporarily unavailable channels (store and forward). In addition, eDelivery ascertains the non-repudiation of receipt and/or origin of every exchange through signature.
The new and extended version of the CEF eDelivery self-assessment tool not only allows you to define the business requirements for your Message Exchange Infrastructure, but also provides the option to score the performance of your current messaging infrastructure (if you have one) against these requirements. As a result, you will be able to compare the performance of your current Message Exchange Infrastructure against the goals above and their relative importance to your business. Subsequently, you will be able to identify the gaps and discover the value CEF eDelivery can bring in solving these gaps across all four goals.
On 16 November 2016, the European Commission organised a webinar to provide an update of the Trusted List Manager of the CEF eSignature building block and an overview of its new functionalities.
During the webinar, experts from the European Commission presented the upcoming new release of the Trusted List (TL) Manager (v.5.1). Presentations also included an updated approach concerning transitional periods and changes to Trusted Lists, "do's-and-don'ts" of Trusted List Management and an introduction to the Pivot LOTL (List of Trusted Lists) concept.
The CEF eSignature building block helps public administrations and businesses to accelerate the creation and verification of electronic signatures. The deployment of solutions based on CEF eSignature in a Member State facilitates the mutual recognition and cross-border interoperability of eSignatures. This means that public administrations and businesses can trust and use eSignatures that are valid and structured in EU-interoperable formats. The CEF eSignature building block consists of advisory services managed by the European Commission. The solution is based primarily on the following services:
The Digital Signature Services (DSS) software library for the creation and validation of e-signatures;
Trusted List Manager, which enables the creation, editing and maintenance of a Trusted List in a standard, machine-readable format;
The main purpose of Trusted List Manager is to align the TL Manager with the eIDAS Regulation on trust services. In addition to this, v.5.1 includes improvements to the Trusted List notification (e.g. electronic form) as well as Trusted List Browsing and monitoring.
Experts from the European Commission noted difficulties in using the Official Journal of the European Union to publish machine-readable changes to the LOTL administrative anchors. Therefore, since 16 June 2016, the LOTL now contains an EU PTOTSL, announcing the List of Trusted List signing certificates, and the XML location and a URI, pointing to the last issued Official Journal publication.
On 29 November, DIGITEC 2016: Digital Future attracted more than 850 people from the EU institutions for a day of inspiring discussions. 36 speakers debated on the workplace of the future, digital democracy and technologies of the future.
The European Commission and European Parliament presented a number of digital services, including one booth entitled "Reusable Components", including the CEF building blocks.
The CEF building blocks offer basic reusable capabilities available for any European project to facilitate the delivery of digital public services across borders. Reusable Components allow solution architects, developers and managers of development teams to avoid starting the construction of their Information Systems from scratch, cutting development costs and improving time to market of their planned solutions.
The informatics departments of the European Commission (DIGIT) and the European Parliament (ITEC) served as co-organisers of DIGITEC 2016: Digital Future, with attendees coming from across the EU Institutions.Opening session, DIGITEC 2016: Digital Future
CEF eID was discussed at the eIDAS Technical Sub Group meeting on technical requirements for implementation of eIDAS via CEF eID, 17 October 2016, from 9:30 -18.00, Aviation House, 125 Kingsway, London.
The eIDAS Technical Sub Group meeting itself consisted broadly of two segments, looking first at User Experience and secondly at the eIDAS technical specifications & other implementation issues. In light of the services CEF eID provides, the meeting's focus on UX and harmonisation was intended to explore the potential for a higher degree of consistency - in terms of visual presentation and process - when using eID to access services across borders, in order not to lose sight of the end user experience when discussing technical interoperability.
The goal of CEF eID is the connection of national eID systems at the EU level, allowing public and private entities to extend the use of their digital services to citizens from other Member States, in compliance with theeIDAS Regulationon trust services. This is done through the establishment of an eIDAS node in each Member State which facilitates the connection of national eID systems. More than twenty European countries currently have eID systems in place.
The eIDAS Technical Sub Group was delighted to welcome Tim Blyth, Delivery Manager for Verify and Polly Gannaway, User Researcher on the Verify Team from GDS, who presented on user experience. During the afternoon session, Livia Ralph, Project Manager, presented GDS’s user experience testing approach applied to service provider portals.
Experts from the European Commission presented on the harmonisation of eID access across Europe. Commission experts explained potential options for creating a more consistent user experience, including potential benefits of each, and proposed several approaches for taking the issue forward, whereby participants asked the Commission's opinions on the desirability and feasibility of harmonisation. Participants noted that while harmonisation has benefits, complete consistency in visual appearance and process faces challenges due to technical, legal and/or other constraints. GDS also presented a case study on a ‘Discovery’ project conducted by GDS to improve the experience of creating a bank account in the UK as a Norwegian immigrant. This involved aligning identity management between Norwegian and UK banks.
Concerning eIDAS technical specifications & other implementation issues, the Subgroup endorsed the final updates of all documents.
As we enter the final period to submit proposals for CEF eInvoicing grant funding, OpenPEPPOL has created a Guidance Paper for members of the OpenPEPPOL Network.
The Guidance Paper includes extracts from the 2016 CEF eInvoicing Call text and the 2016 CEF Telecom Work Programme, but also contains subjective opinions based on previous experience, meant solely to help OpenPEPPOL members understand the process and priorities.
The purpose of OpenPEPPOL is to enable European businesses to easily deal electronically with any European public sector buyers in their procurement processes, thereby increasing opportunities for greater competition for government contracts and providing better value for taxpayers’ money.
You can find the event agenda, recording and download the presentations here.
The European Commisison provides information on the uptake of CEF eDelivery & CEF eInvoicing via the CEF Dashboard.
Register for the CEF Digital 2018 Newsletter here.
The CEF eDelivery Infrastructure Day (29 November) explored how CEF eDelivery - supported by the eIDAS Regulation - can help removing digital barriers within the Digital Single Market to deliver value to citizens, businesses and public administrations.
More specifically, domain experts presented the CEF eDelivery user-journey, reaching out to participants for their views and experiences on how best to efficiently set-up an eDelivery infrastructure.
Case studies from eDelivery implementations in the Netherlands, Norway and Germany offered insights into how CEF eDelivery can be implemented in a national context. It was highlighted that there is a need to further enhance knowledge of eDelivery on the ground.
Some participants commented on the need for the eIDAS Regulation to precede a standard about the qualification of trust service providers in the context of Security Models. It was noted that the existence of a common standard could help overcome the challenges in the qualification process of ERDS, and that further actions by the European Commission should be planned together with the parties involved.
During the CEF eDelivery Industry Day (30 November), experts discussed what is currently missing to create an eDelivery market in the context of the Digital Single Market.
Software vendors in offering an AS4 solution are free to use the CEF eDelivery Conformance Testing Service. The goal of the service is to verify that an implementation of the CEF eDelivery Access Point and SMP components - a software package either commercial or Open Source - conforms to the relevant CEF eDelivery specifications. Visit CEF eDelivery for more information or email CEF Digital 2018.
Participants discuss during CEF eDelivery Infrastructure & Industry Days (29 & 30 November 2016)
At the CEF eInvoicing Stakeholder Day (1 December), stakeholders from the private and public sectors exchange views around CEF eInvoicing and the status of eInvoicing in Europe.
Panellists stressed the value of eInvoicing and commended the work of the European Commission. The panel noted that national fora supporting eInvoicing must make the benefits of eInvoicing the core of their message and be supported by government. In addition, key themes included the need to simplify the adoption of the Directive 2014/55/EU, ensure local interoperability and foster a culture of ownership among public and private sector entities.
