The portal, etenders.gov.eg, designed to help the government to publish tenders and auctions over the Internet in all areas, and to make it easier for suppliers to apply for those operations and evaluating their bids electronically so as to ensure transparency.
The portal developed using a set of open source solutions, such as the programming language (PHP), and database management system (MySQL), and the web server software (Apache).
Haitham Nabil, a former director of software development unit of the Ministry of Administrative Development, said that using free and open source software saved 180 million Egyptian pounds as opposed to software licenses.
Also, He added that the free and open source software solutions that have been relied upon when developing the portal proved their quality. Upon the launch, the portal used to register more than 500 government entities and nearly 4,000 supplier/user without any problems.
The portal provides many services to its users of suppliers and buyers. Any supplier can easily gain access to the portal through registration, thus he will be able to join opened tenders/auctions and securely bid for any of them. The suppliers' registration is one of the main features, after the supplier is registered he will be able to deal with all government entities utilizing the portal. As for buyer users, they will benefit from central procurement, tenders/auctions publishing, tenders/auctions electronic evaluation.
