As a proponent and business owner of SharePoint 2003 technologies, this article on Security Pipeline caught my eye:

When President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry square off Friday at Washington University in round two of their presidential debates, the event will spur an intense IT integration effort pulling together national, state, and local emergency responders. These responders will rely on the real-time flow of data to ensure that the only bombs going off in St. Louis are rhetorical.

To do this, the event's incident-command team, comprised of police from St. Louis County and Washington University, firefighters from the city of Clayton, Mo., and agents from the U.S. Secret Service, will rely heavily on a Microsoft SharePoint-based portal modified by service provider Convergence Communications LLC. In its university lecture hall headquarters, the command team will have 25 PCs that can send and receive data over a LAN to as many as 450 police officers positioned across the campus, regardless of whether the officer hails from county, city, or university forces. Five officers normally patrol this same area.

The portal will let command-center workers exchange instant messages, share data, and have joint access to a checklist of tasks that need to be completed on schedule. For example, if a road is scheduled to be closed at a given time, the officer closing that road must communicate via the portal that he accomplished this task. "If the task is overdue, the list will flash so that the commanders know there's a problem..."

Very cool. Granted, it's a million-dollar system built on SharePoint as a platform - what do you figure the price would have been in the private sector though?