I spent the morning at the local Microsoft office in Bloomington to hear about and see some demos on the Citizen Service Platform — based on SharePoint, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and Microsoft Live. It’s essentially a bundling of existing tools, with a number of templates that act as a start in developing further tools and templates based on the platform.

Microsoft isn’t exactly changing their marketing approach. You’re not going to see Microsoft itself horning in on businesses like Avenet’s GovOffice — yet, but you will see any number of Microsoft Partners looking for ways begin integrating the public-facing and city-management sides of the equation in some pretty sexy ways. This is the kind of thing that has the chance of bringing municipal websites to the level of technology of today’s (and not 1998’s) hottest commerical web ventures.

I filled four pages in my notebook sketching out ideas that I — thanks to nearly six years servicing this market — think would make loads of sense for me as a citizen of the World, the United States, Minnesota, Eagan, and School District 196.

Let’s see if I can decipher it and separate it from the alphabet soup that appears to have been spilled throughout the same pages..