SBA creates virtual class to teach 2000 lessons
The Small Business Administration is finishing work on an online virtual classroom to help small businesses deal with their year 2000 problems. The virtual classroom is part of an overall effort organized by the President's Council on the Year 2000 Conversion. The Clinton administration last month spearheaded a National Y2K Action Week to get year 2000 information out to the public, and, especially, small and medium-sized businesses [GCN, Oct. 12, Page 8].
Howard, the first CIO of FTS, to retire after 35 years in government
Steve Howard, the first chief information officer at the General Services Administration's Federal Technology Service, will retire from his post at the end of the year, completing 35 years of government service. "I decided to retire because I've had a full, rewarding and satisfying career," he said, and this represents an "opportune time to move on to new challenges."
Goal is to make exchanges easy
Patricia Watkins Lattimore was confirmed as the Assistant Secretary for Administration and Management at the Labor Department in November of last year. She is also Labor's chief information officer. Lattimore has worked in the public sector since she was 18. She has held several positions at both Labor and the Office of Personnel Management in Washington, Philadelphia and Atlanta.
Well-planned seat management sits well with users
Consider this: Once upon a time, turning off the computer was clearly a hardware function. But with recent PCs and with Microsoft Windows 95 or Windows 98, it's both a software and hardware operation. Or this: Many users are so accustomed to using network drives that it's easy to forget that these drives are on another computer, possibly in another building or another state.
AF matches posts, personnel
The Air Force last month approved a system that could help it better assign the right officers to the right jobs. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Ryan and the service's other top brass gave the new assignment system a final review early last month at Corona, the quarterly meeting of senior service leaders in Colorado Springs, Colo.
EPA overhaul calls for a new systems office
The Environmental Protection Agency will reorganize its information management organization, according to an internal Oct. 14 memorandum from EPA Administrator Carol Browner. A task force of senior managers that Browner created in August has recommended that the agency establish a single program manager for information management and policy, and Browner has agreed. The head of the new organization will not necessarily be the chief information officer, Browner said.
INS gets reprieve on gathering entry and exit data
INS plans to build on existing systems to gather entry and exit data. The Immigration and Naturalization Service missed its Oct. 1 deadline to develop a system to track foreign visitors as they enter and leave the United States, forcing Congress to give the agency more time. Congress, under the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, originally gave INS until the first of this month to implement an automated entry-exit control
Former Microsoft contractor Ed Curry says that the company deliberately misledgovernment buyers
A Texas software engineer gave the Defense Department documents that he said prove that Microsoft Corp. is conducting a campaign to mislead the government about the security certification status of Microsoft Windows NT. Ed Curry, whose now-defunct company worked with Microsoft to obtain the National Security Agency's C2 certification for NT 3.5 during the mid-1990s, met earlier this month with Richard Schaeffer, director of information assurance in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for
FTS hustles to replace its long-distance service
FTS' Dennis Fischer says an FTS 2001 award is possible by "maybe early December." As the General Services Administration last week celebrated the FTS 2000 contract's 10-year run with representatives of AT&T Corp. and Sprint Corp., the agency's Federal Technology Service was scrambling to award an FTS 2001 long-distance replacement before FTS 2000 runs out Dec. 7.
Betting on voice over IP? It's your call.
01 Communiqu' Laboratory Inc. 1450 Meyerside Drive Mississauga, Ont., Canada L5T 2N5 905-795-2888 http://www.01com.com Communicate 8.0 is Microsoft Windows software, requires 15M to 18M hard drive space and is compatible with most fax modems. It has a user-friendly telephone look-and-feel and is a full-function data and fax communications program with strong voice-over-IP capability. Price: $79
SNEAKER.NET
Q. I want a Zip removable-media drive for my computer. Since there's a printer already connected to the parallel port, I need another port for the Zip drive. Does anyone make parallel ISA or PCI cards? A. Yes, but you don't need one. Iomega Corp. of Roy, Utah, realized that folks like yourself might hesitate to buy, so it put a passthrough port in all its parallel-based Zip drives.
Network Solutions is still in the driver's seat for domain names
Will the federal government ever find a way to extract Network Solutions Inc. of Herndon, Va., from the center of the Internet Domain Name System? Just when we thought the company's control over .com, .net, .org and .edu domain registration was coming to an end, the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration cut a deal to extend NSI's contract for another two years [GCN, Oct. 12, Page 61].
Rat spies hidden truths in Microsoft's send-up of Volkswagen TV ad
Packet Rat R. Fink While fellow attendees fought altitude sickness in Denver at Microsoft Corp.'s professional developer conference, the cyberrodent collected tchotchkes to line the walls of the burrow against the coming cold weather. He sipped bottled water bearing the Windows logo and pondered the eternal question: Just what is Microsoft's enterprise strategy?
IBM plans a price cut for OS/390 software products
"Our plan depends on higher volumes at competitive rates." IBM Corp. plans to cut prices for its OS/390 mainframe software products by more than 20 percent a year. The company's nine OS/390 pricing models will shrink to two as IBM moves away from traditional capacity pricing and adopts use pricing.
CIOs mull plan for IT pay scale
RICHMOND, Va.—To keep the information technology workers the government has now and attract new recruits, the Chief Information Officers Council is weighing the creation of a separate pay scale for government IT employees. Council officials said they think that offering better pay will attract IT employees and retain existing staff members, many of whom leave government for more lucrative private-sector jobs.
Army, VA speed approval processes for technical refreshment
VA and Army officials want to close the competitive gap between IDIQs and GSA schedule contracts. One knock against indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contracts has been that even their newest products are often out of date. But some agencies are trying to do something about that. The Army and the Veterans Affairs Department have whittled to within a month and a week, respectively, the time it takes them to approve engineering changes to IDIQ buys of PCs.
Lawmakers push FAA officials for progress on year 2000 fixes
Senate lawmakers last month questioned why the Federal Aviation Administration paints a rosier picture of its year 2000 progress than do the General Accounting Office and others. "Why are GAO and the Air Traffic Controllers Association more skeptical about your ability to be prepared than you've indicated here in your testimony?" asked Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah) during a hearing of his Special Senate Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem.
How to spend that free (i.e. unpaid) time on your hands this fall
It's fall again, and the smell of unpassed budget legislation is in the air. While Congress debates whether lying about sex is an impeachable offense—depending on how you define "is"—the Rat is finalizing his fall shutdown vacation plans. Do the math: Impeachment plus budget impasse equals gridlock. After last fall's abortive effort to take an extended vacation without burning leave, the cyberrodent has adopted a more scientific approach to fiscal brinkmanship—especially in view of the amount of
Corps works to ensure a Net-friendly environment
Sites with hacking information, explicit sex and bomb-making recipes are off-limits at all times. The Army Corps of Engineers' district office in Huntington, W.Va., wanted a handle on its Internet use. "We were having some slowdown in traffic going outside the district office," said Ken Shaffer, the district's information management project manager.
Casahl software synchronizes, replicates databases
Its flagship product, Replic-Action for Lotus Notes, replicates data between Lotus Domino/Notes groupware and relational database management systems. The Replic-Action 5.1 release supports real-time event logging and remote administration from a Web browser. Several server replication and synchronization products for Microsoft Exchange groupware are new this year. Replic-Action Interchange complements Exchange's data synchronizing functions by doing cross-domain and field-level replication between Exchange servers.
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