The primary objective of the portal that was opened on 12 March 2003 was to share information. At that time, the ability to provide the opportunities that are available today was still far in the future. Today, thanks to developments and improvements, eesti.ee is a safe channel through which citizens, entrepreneurs, as well as officials can communicate with the state.
The creation of the State Portal
The appearance of the header of the State Portal in 2003, right after the information portal was opened.
On 12 March 2003, the Department of State Information Systems (RISO) of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications opened www.eesti.ee, an information portal for citizens www.eesti.ee.
The new information portal gave people information about their rights and obligations in Estonia. In addition, the portal provided practical advice on how to deal with state institutions.
Opening the state portal was an important step in ensuring that, in the future, dealing with the institutions of the state, the third sector, and the private sector would be easier for people. The content of the information portal was updated constantly and the topics that were planned to be available in Estonian were finished within a year.
Acquiring information and making queries occurs in separate portals. To use e-services, the information portal directs the users to the citizen’s portal. In the environment for making queries of the citizen’s portal, the citizens can view their data from different databases and registers. The portal can be entered through the internet bank or with an ID-card.
The new portal was developed from the previous e-country portal www.riik.ee. The Estonian Informatics Centre is responsible for its content.
To make queries and use the services, people had to log into the X-Road environment.
Development and presentation of the new concept
The portal is updated constantly. In 2005, the Russian and English content of eesti.ee is unveiled. At the same time, the new concept ‘Your Estonia’ is introduced and the development of the information portal receives a new direction.
The objective of the concept ‘Your Estonia’ is to make the portal as well as the design of the information architecture more user-friendly. The information systems that have been developed so far have mainly been based on the systems used by institutions and ministries and are very uncomfortable and confusing for users.
Now, more attention is paid to the opportunities of entrepreneurs, as well. The official @eesti.ee e-mail system begins to offer services also to entrepreneurs, so the e-mails sent by the state would reach the correct e-mail address through a reliable route.
The e-services of the information portal and the citizen’s portal are still separate. Instead of the forms that had previously been available online, the development of new e-forms that can be filled out and sent in the portal begins. The development is led by the information system authority of that time.
The developed three-language view of the portal, where an entrepreneur can direct their official e-mail.
The portal starts to reflect the entire country
In the September of 2007, an important and welcome change is made – the State Portal eesti.ee is completed.
The new State Portal combines the previous information portal and citizen’s portal. The information and services are divided for citizens, entrepreneurs, and officials based on their role. Now, e-services and information are available in one unified portal.
The new look of the unified State Portal in 2007.
By 2008, all of the former independent state portals have been redirected to the state portal eesti.ee (in addition to the citizen’s portal, the e-country portal www.riik.ee, and the X-Road portal). This makes finding information about the state easier.
As a new feature, mobile-ID could be used for logging into the portal.
The opportunity to log in with mobile-ID makes using the services of the State Portal easier. In developing the State Portal, more attention is paid to user friendliness and increasing the number of users.
- One month after the unified State Portal eesti.ee is opened, nearly 110,000 people, including 8,000 people abroad, mainly from Finland, Sweden, and the U.S., have visited the portal.
- During that time, about 19,000 people and 17,000 companies are using the official e-mail system @eesti.ee.
The State Portal eesti.ee receives a new look and new content
In 2009, eesti.ee is given a new logo. A year later, an information campaign is organised to reach the people living in rural areas who could benefit from the services of the State Portal the most. By the autumn of 2011, more content is provided for entrepreneurs. The navigation scheme and the design of the website are more user-friendly than before.
The new portal includes more than 200 services, 400 articles and 2,500 contacts. Two of the more important developments are the information search engine and a user’s folder of personal data.
The look of the State Portal with new content and functions in 2011.
The creation of new services is made easier. The State Portal starts offering versatile options for using e-services to institutions, for example:
- sending reminders to people with the notification service
- the ability of authentication via ID-card, mobile-ID, or the internet bank in information systems outside the State Portal
- accepting electronical applications through the State Portal.
Since 2011, the developer and administrator of the State Portal is the Information System Authority.
Personal homepage
On the 10th anniversary (2013) of the State Portal, a homepage for users that are logged in is completed, which gathers information about a person from different registers to one page. This allows users to have a quick and easy overview of their data on one page.
After logging in, you can see your data on your personal homepage.
In 2014, entrepreneur’s notifications are added to the highly popular Traffic Registry notifications.
In 2015, 815 e-services are available in eesti.ee. During 2014, the portal has users from more than 200 countries and 9,000 cities. The most popular activities on the site include viewing the menu of My data, logging into SAIS, adding data to the certificate of temporary incapacity for work, and viewing prescriptions.
The terms of use change
In December 2015, the terms of notifications of eesti.ee are changed. With forwarding their @eesti.ee e-mail address, the person gives consent to state institutions to send official documents and notifications to them to this e-mail address. This also means that the person grants consent for the electronic delivery of documents if consent is required by the law.
In 2016, the updating process of the technologically out-of-date portal begins. In addition, the appearance and design of eesti.ee change and the topic groups of articles are ranked by popularity.
The homepage of the portal as of 19 June 2017.
On 19 June 2017, the updated portal is revealed to users – at first, the article section which can be read without logging into the portal. The pages of different topics are illustrated with photos taken by Estonian photographers. The upgraded portal is also easy to use with a phone or a tablet.
The topic page of the portal as of 19 June 2017.
Two portals remain in use – the new portal includes articles and the old one includes e-services.
Users can express their opinions beneath the articles.
To provide better content, every article is accompanied by a question of whether the user got an answer for their question or what question they are still looking an answer for.
The e-services are rearranged
During the upgrading of eesti.ee, the e-services that have been created over time are checked to avoid duplicated, low-quality, and dated e-services. Eesti.ee is still a gateway to the e-country by providing information and an overview about e-services in one place.
In 2017, the portal was logged into 3,870,000 times.
By the end of 2017, 398,677 people had forwarded their @eesti.ee e-mail addresses.
In the spring of 2017, a data monitoring system is implemented. This allows people to get an overview of the state institutions that have used their data.
In 2017, eesti.ee includes 1,330 articles, 154 services, and 2,866 contacts in Estonian, Russian, and English.
The most popular activities on the site include viewing the menu of My data, adding data to the certificate of temporary incapacity for work, and viewing prescriptions and benefits for incapacity for work. The most popular article is about national, public, and school holidays.
In 2017, RIA promises to present a new log-in view for the 100th anniversary of the Republic of Estonia, which will harmonise the visual appearance of eesti.ee and, among other things, eliminate the technological debt. Eesti.ee is a gateway to e-services, or a set of links – as part of organising the e-services, a number of local government services etc. are removed from the portal, as this administrative model is considered unsustainable. There are more than 5,000 e-services in the country.
In 2017, RIA promises to present a new log-in view for the 100th anniversary of the Republic of Estonia
In 2018, the new blue portal is ready for the 100th anniversary of the Republic of Estonia
From the second half of 2017, the vision of eesti.ee is recreated, with an event-based approach as the main idea. It is considered important that people can get an overview of information in one place, whether it is the birth of a child or the death of a loved one.
The blue portal with a new approach is available to users in December 2018 at a cost of around €300,000. The new design reuses the style guide created for the Estonian Tax and Customs Board portal. The latter is a good guideline on how to develop e-services in the country in a more cost-effective way.
In 2018, the new blue portal with a more event-based homepage is ready for the 100th anniversary of the Republic of Estonia.
In 2021, the national mailbox is automatically forwarded to 1.3 million citizens
In March 2021, the national mailbox located in eesti.ee is redirected to the e-mail addresses of the citizens as recorded in the population register – 1.3 million redirections instead of the current 400,000. The change is motivated by the desire to share vaccination information more effectively with citizens and to invite people to vaccinate by age group. This change is significant – whereas before the responsibility for redirecting lay with the individual, now the state does it for the citizen.
In the summer of 2021, the technical capacity of eesti.ee is increased and the Angular web framework is introduced instead of the Vue web framework, which makes the portal more sustainable and enables a more distributed architecture. The aim is to increase the reliability of applications and ensure greater independence. The self-service module (e.g. My Data, the mailbox, the Personal Data Usage Monitor, etc.) and the content information is placed together in the menu on the left in the logged-in view to make the information easier to find. In the autumn, new functionalities are added to the national mailbox, such as the possibility to sign and encrypt documents.
In the summer of 2021, eesti.ee is transferred to a new, more technically capable web framework.
In December 2021, a consent service is launched that allows people to give their consent to the state to share their personal data with a specific service provider, for example for the purpose of instalment payments.
Eesti.ee has nearly 7 million visitors a year, and in March, vaccination information attracts 1.1 million visitors.
Eesti.ee has a total of 1,350 articles in Estonian, Russian and English and 85 e-services.
The most popular services are health-related: certificates of incapacity for work, checking prescriptions and data in the Estonian Health Insurance Fund. Notarial documents and the traffic insurance history are also important in the entrepreneur view.
In 2022, renewed entrepreneur environment in eesti.ee and closure of the green portal
The new entrepreneur portal is ready in November 2022.
The year 2022 is eventful for eesti.ee, in November, the new entrepreneur environment is launched, which brings together all the important information and services that an entrepreneur needs to do business with the state – from the material needed to establish a company to the services that company accountants use on a daily basis to ensure the operation of the company. The state portal is the only environment where certificates of incapacity for work are forwarded, and this service also ranks highest in usage statistics. In addition, entrepreneurs and company employees mainly use the environment for company and personal data inquiries, for making requests for holiday pay and average salary compensation, and for verifying notarial documents, traffic insurance history, and data.
A new desktop opens in the self-service, containing the main business data (e.g. name, registry code, field of activity code) of the company, the most used e-services, and the obligations of the company (including information on submitting the annual report, value added tax return, and reports). Entrepreneurs will also find a data map with links to key activities and information for entrepreneurs in the state, including obligations, funding opportunities, statistics and network information for those heading to foreign markets.
In total, there are 30 services in the entrepreneur environment.
Together with the completion of the entrepreneur view, the entire portal is updated, user-friendliness is improved and there is a strong emphasis on the integration of e-services and information articles to increase the findability of services.
In December of the same year, the old ‘green portal’ is closed and eesti.ee is in a single blue environment. In July 2021, the government allocated a one-time amount of 500,000 euros for closing the green portal after an illegal download of ID photos. Since then, more than 10,000 hours of work is done to close the old portal to the end user.
The green face of the national portal reached users in 2011 and is closed in 2022.
Two new event services are added to eesti.ee – ‘marriage’ and ‘birth of a child’. You can start submitting your marriage application via eesti.ee, from where you can go to the population register with a single sign-on. A single sign-on capability (the State SSO) is also ready in December. Information on the birth of a child is supported by an interactive timeline that provides all the necessary information from planning for pregnancy to the child’s third birthday.
Eesti.ee is an important focal point for the state’s ‘My Data’ and e-services, allowing people to keep track of their rights and obligations. By logging on to the portal, everyone can get the information they need on documents, health, family, children, benefits and obligations.
Eesti.ee is visited by nearly 7 million visitors a year and more than 3.5 million notifications are sent to citizens through the mailbox about the expiry of documents, polling cards, national defence obligations, fines, and other information.
Eesti.ee has a total of 1,700 articles in Estonian, Russian and English and 100 e-services.
