ENVIRONET aimed at establishing a user-friendly technical platform for the exchange of mail, alarm messages and relevant data between Europe administrations within the environment sector in order to increase efficiency and lower costs. It also aimed to stimulate the development of standardisation in administrative routines, technical methods and formats.
The ENVIRONET concept integrates the national requirements for transnational communications within the field of environment and crisis management. The demonstrations used various principles of information and data retrieval, storage, archiving, exchange and processing which are required by the three pilot scenarios, called ECASE (Emergency Control and Alarm Systems based on ENVIRONET).

- ECASE AIR demonstrated alarming and event handling in case of an incident with substances causing air pollution.

- ECASE RIVER demonstrated alarm reporting and decision support for authorities involved in river pollution incidents.
The project has been carried out in close co-operation with the relevant administrations on the river Rhine and with the EU for the Protection of the Rhine against pollution (ICPR).

- ECASE COAST demonstrated alarm and event handling in case of pollution incidents in coastal waters. The Mediterranean area between Greece and Italy was chosen for the demonstration.

ENVIRONET complies with international standards wherever they are available, and will conform to the Open Architecture Model where products exist, using X.25 as bearer services and X.400, X.500 Directory Service and FTP as telematics services. 'Alarm and Event Data Transfer' was designed as an EDIFACT conformant message. Exchange and storage formats were examined, and trials were made using converters for the transnational exchange according to the ISO standard 7168 for air measurement data.
The overall concept of ENVIRONET defines four major areas:

- User Systems: as each category of user needs a specific set of applications for its tasks, the same application can be implemented differently by the administrations. This gives a particular emphasis to the need for a common architecture and agreed standardised data structures. A specific set of applications is needed by ENVIRONET users to allow them to optimise performance of environmental tasks.

- Data communication services: the ENVIRONET Service Node and the ENVIRONET data communication services decentralised.
An ENVIRONET Service Node (ESN) provides the functions of Directory Service, Alarming, Event/Document Information Handling, and Access to external data bases via the ESN, Mail Handling/Mailbox. The technical architecture uses the X.25, X.400, X.500 Directory Service standards and FTP with possible upgrading to FTAM as telematic services.

- Data Suppliers/External Data Bases ENVIRONET accesses X.500 directory services for user data, in addition to information available in the Yellow Pages directory at the ESN.

- The Network Infrastructure: the ENVIRONET architecture is based on a Client-Server mode which offers high level communications services such as store and forward messaging, file transfer, terminal emulation, and a directory. The physical and logical connections between the user and the ESN are established via the X.25 network or the ISDN.