The Covid-19 pandemic led to a large-scale transition. The remote work of millions of people around the world. Information and communication technologies have met this challenge by ensuring the uninterrupted operation of services and businesses.

Each organization and citizen responded with different effectiveness to the challenge of digital remote work. But how did we meet the above challenges at the local level?

The IT service of the Municipality of Heraklion in the framework of the project “Heraklion, smart city” has implemented using free, open source software (openstack, owncloud, jitsi meet, horde, wso2 etc.) the following electronic services for remote work of its executives. Services can be accessed through a single user access system (SSO) using unique passwords:

Email: Full possibility of remote management of electronic mail via internet (webmail).

File management: The management of incoming and outgoing documents of the Municipality services can be done with a remote access.

Management of citizens requests: The citizens’ requests can be managed by the employees with remote access. It should be noted that from March 13, 2020 there was an increase of electronic requests from citizens’ by 50% in the 163 electronic services in various levels that are offered from Municipality of Heraklion.

Save and share files: Storage, management and sharing files with a cloud storage service.

Teleconferencing: From March 13, the e-presence and Webex teleconferencing systems provided by the Ministry of Digital Policy and KEDE respectively are used. So far, 40 council and committee teleconferences have been held with 498 participants elected and employees with a total duration of 2725 minutes. The Municipality, using the free software platform jitsi, already has its own teleconferencing system installed in its privately owned datacenter.

Digital Signatures: During the period of health crisis, the Municipality provided its executives with an additional one hundred (100) Digital Certificates (Digital Signatures) for the security of the electronic communication of the employees and the citizens with its services.

In the last two years, another one hundred (100) Digital Certificates have already been distributed.

Single User Access and Authentication System(SSO): The Municipality has a system of uniform access and authentication of users to the online services it offers to its employees and citizens.

Datacenter: All the above services use the infrastructure of the Datacenter of the Municipality of Heraklion.

The implementation of these high efficiency services without special costs for the Municipality, proves that the lack of material resources is not the main obstacle in the way for the digital transformation of our country and cities.