During the period from early 2008 through mid-2009, representatives from many of the operational public health groups across the state worked together to identify the requirements necessary to support the improvement of outbreak management in New York. These requirements were prioritized by the project team and the highest level requirements were approved to begin the design and development of the Outbreak Management System (OMS). The system included the following features: creating a central outbreak incident to record incident level information, generating a unique identifier that can be shared across integrated applications to facilitate aggregated query and reporting capabilities with a common data set shared across the jurisdictions and program areas involved in an outbreak investigation and providing forms that are customizable for an outbreak but use standard sets of questions and a common vocabulary where possible. The OMS user guide and training were provided to those who will be using it to manage outbreak incidents.