Online services can help office managers trim resource budgets
In spite of agencies' enforced frugality, the costs of running an office continue to climb. Managers looking for creative ways to cut costs can tap online resources for some office services. If you don't trust e-mail for sensitive documents and you don't want to give outsiders access to internal systems via File Transfer Protocol or an extranet, look into secure e-mail.
Windows 98 offers few clues on fixing hardware failures
Sometimes computers seem to live a bug's life. Having postponed an upgrade to Microsoft Windows 98 for quite a few months, I decided to try it out on a sub-$1,000 GT200 system bought last year from TigerDirect Inc. of Miami. Surprise: The 24X CD-ROM drive no longer would read any disks, although its drawer kept popping out randomly against my knee.
Neil J. Stillman will retire in April after 30 years of federal IT service
Neil J. Stillman, the deputy chief information officer at the Health and Human Services Department and a career federal official, will retire in April. Stillman has spent more than 30 years in government service. He came to HHS in 1990 from the Defense Intelligence Agency's Office of the Systems Architect. Before that, he held systems posts at the General Services Administration, the former Defense Communications Agency and the Customs Service.
DUAL-SPEED WORKGROUP HUBS
Are you looking for flexibility, low cost and a good price-performance ratio in a workgroup hub? Who isn't, you say? Your search is over. A move to dual-speed 10/100 Ethernet/Fast Ethernet autosensing hubs is the way to go to fold 10-Mbps LANs into a high-speed 100-Mbps Fast Ethernet system.
Commerce program looks to bolster EC with common library of XML definitions
"Without some kind of common business library, the whole promise of XML goes out the window," Tenenbaum said recently. Officials in the Commerce Department's Advanced Technology Program apparently shared Tenenbaum's view enough to award a $4.8 million contract in 1997 to the CommerceNet consortium and three Internet startup companies.
ENTERPRISE COMPUTING | NEW PRODUCTS
The Xerox Model 8825 printer for engineering workgroups produces A- to E-sized drawings at 400-dot-per-inch resolution. Powered by a 200-MHz PowerPC 603e chip, the 8825 can render 33 levels of grayscale and single-pixel lines. The TCP/IP network printer comes with a suite of client software tools for remote access and queue management.
Air Force groups set controls on use of products
But SSG and AFMC will have to rely on friendly persuasion, mindful of each unit's control over its own budget, Air Force officials said. Debra Haley, AFMC's chief information officer at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, said she is careful to refer to the command's users as customers. At SSG, the mandated presence of Microsoft Exchange Server and a modified version of the Exchange client for the Defense Message System forced officials to implement more central
Net conniptions
The Internet continues to give agencies fits. I hear a refrain. Something bad happens—perhaps one isolated incident—and agencies backtrack until they can devise new policies. Or, like Justice, they plow ahead with a heavy-handed policy. The danger is real; the velocity and unruliness of the Web resists security. An agency's ability to ensure that it posts accurate information reflects well on the organization.
Inexpensive Advan monitor doesn't stand up to close scrutiny
Out of the box, the AGM15T looked impressive. It has a large screen for an LCD and was fairly easily connected to my test computer. An optional Universal Serial Bus hub could make the monitor compatible with ultra-modern as well as older office environments. Unfortunately, neither Microsoft Windows 95 nor Windows 98 could properly detect the AGM15T as new hardware. Both operating systems instead used a plug-and-play monitor driver that gave the Advan poor resolution and
Hiring efforts pay off for IRS
The IRS is continuing to raid industry to build its systems staff. Albert E. Mazei was senior vice president and chief information officer of BTG Inc. of Fairfax, Va., before he joined the IRS last year as assistant commissioner of the Program Management and Engineering Office. Mazei will be a principal adviser to IRS CIO Paul J. Cosgrave, who came to the service last year from American Management Systems Inc., also of Fairfax.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
I seldom write letters in response to articles I read, but this one was impossible to resist. The opening line of the story "Software training is on course" [GCN, Dec. 14, 1998, Page 33] gives a very disturbing statistic. The line is: "A distance-learning initiative has cut the Education Department's training expenses by nearly 4,000 percent, an agency official said." In the next sentence of the article the actual costs are discussed. These have dropped from
DOT seeks employees' views
"I wanted to do surveys using the Web and found SurveyWin very difficult," he said. EZSurvey 98's $399 price—low when compared with other survey packages, which had price tags as high as $5,000—persuaded him to give Raosoft a second shot. Woodmansee, a personnel management specialist in human resources automation at the office of the Transportation secretary, used EZSurvey 98 to query 100,000 civilian and Coast Guard employees via DOT's Web site.
Feds find that reliability is in the cards
Government Computer News survey: network PC Cards Overall Reliability Ease of Use Speed Full-duplex capabilities Price Documentation and help 3Com Corp. 76 91 85 84 73 58 64 Compaq Computer Corp. 67 88 88 63 63 50 50 Xircom Inc. 61 76 76 59 53
Army will fall short of OMB 2000 deadline
The Army will not meet the governmentwide deadline mandated by the Office of Management and Budget for having 100 percent of systems year 2000-ready, according to a senior service official. About 94 percent of Army installations will meet year 2000 compliance come March, Browning said. But all weapons systems, including tanks, helicopters, aircraft and field artillery, will be fixed by the OMB deadline, she said.
Wang Federal wins contract to consolidate NASA's networks
Wang Federal Systems this month won a 10-year, $453 million contract to run NASA's networks. The McLean, Va., company will consolidate NASA's WANs and support data distribution for the agency's four strategic R&D enterprises: Aerospace Technology, Earth Science, Human Exploration and Development of Space, and Space Science. Aerospace Technology develops aeronautical and space transportation technologies. Earth Science studies the Earth's environment. Human Exploration and De velopment of Space focuses on space exploration. Space Science studies the mysteries
BREAKING NEWS
Kathleen Monahan, project manager for NPR's Balanced Measures Project, said the guide will show agencies how to use the balanced scorecard method to measure performance. The balanced scorecard approach takes into account both an agency's mission and services as well as customer satisfaction and employee training, she said. "If you just focus on business results, you're not going to be fully successful," said Monahan, who is on assignment to NPR from the Housing and Urban Development
NIH fields data warehouse
The National Institutes of Health spent three years building a 27G data warehouse to answer frequent calls for management data from its own staff, Congress and the public. After assembling the NIH Data Warehouse, the agency's Information Systems Branch is looking for a sharp drop in demands on its time as managers get more familiar with the warehouse's self-service data marts.
Army plan to accelerate vital systems buys falters
An Army program designed to hasten the purchase of 11 high-priority systems for the service's digital battlefield initiative has fallen short of its objectives, according to a recent General Accounting Office report. The Army began the Warfighting Rapid Acquisition Program in 1996 to speed up the fielding of new technologies needed by soldiers. By making funds available faster than would be the case through the standard budget process, WRAP was
MKS Toolkit's centerpiece supports graphical shell scripts
Developers who make the transition from Unix to Microsoft Windows often discover, from long and painful experience, that the Unix way of doing things doesn't work. They nevertheless want to take their Unix skills with them, and organizations want to leverage their investments in Unix shell scripts.
USPS tries data mart technology to help maintain sales, inventory info
The Postal Service is testing a retail data mart that will help post offices track their sales and decide what items to stock. The data mart will use information gathered by the service's Point of Sale One program. The POS ONE systems record sales at individual post offices. USPS officials said the data mart will let the service mine data in new ways.
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