Web site supplies tailor-made law data for business
The Labor Department practice of posting in-depth, customized information on its Web site is a model for other agencies to follow, Labor officials said. The public can examine issues in labor law at the Labor's Employment Laws Assistance for Workers and Small Businesses (ELAWS) site at http://www.dol.gov/elaws/ and get answers tailored to their situations by a series of questions.
Virtual private network products are the hot trend
ATLANTA—Virtual private networking over secured Internet connections was the hottest trend at last month's NetWorld+Interop trade show. At least 16 companies announced at least 24 VPN products. "Everybody here is selling some VPN product," said Dayton Semerjian, senior marketing director at Shiva Corp. of Bedford, Mass. Its three VPN announcements made the company attractive to Intel Corp., which announced an agreement to acquire Shiva last month.
Johnson, industry executive of the year, vows Lockheed will deliver on FAA pact
Arthur E. Johnson, GCN's 1998 industry executive of the year, is president and chief operating officer of the Lockheed Martin information and services sector, a division of Lockheed Martin Corp. In 1997, his sector earned $6.5 billion, partly from work on the Global Transportation Network for the U.S. Transportation Command and the Display System Replacement Program for the Federal Aviation Administration.
BREAKING NEWS
GSA's Federal Technology Service issued several amendments to the FTS 2001 request for proposals last month in response to comments by potential bidders. Final changes to bidder proposals were due last week. FTS expects to issue a request for best-and-final offers by the end of the month, and only price changes will be permitted in the final offers due Dec. 1.
IBM deals a card to connect PC, mainframe servers
The Escon cards work with several Netfinity servers. IBM Corp. this month delivered an Escon adapter to connect IBM Netfinity PC servers to IBM S/390 mainframe servers at rates of up to 200 megabytes/sec. Users pay about $12,500 for the high-speed, bi-directional connection, IBM officials said. The direct-connect Escon cards work with several Netfinity servers that IBM introduced in September. The high-end Netfinity 7000M10, a four-way, 400-MHz Pentium II Xeon system, runs Microsoft Windows NT
Workgroups, see the benefits of building your own Web site
Did the LAN administrator have a panic attack when your workgroup requested a Web site for leaving or retrieving messages remotely? If so, just consider the booming market in firewalls. Security breaches have plagued many administrators who linked their office networks to the Web or provided dial-up access for employees.
NSF will stop developing Mac versions of certain agencywide business applications
The National Science Foundation has become the second federal organization in recent months to announce that some of its business applications will no longer run on Apple Macintosh systems. But "people can keep their Macs if they want," said Fred Wendling, director of NSF's Division of Information Systems. After peaking at 12 percent a few years ago, Macs now number 7 percent of NSF's client base, Wendling said.
Base updates its training LAN
The Training and Education Center at McGhee-Tyson Air National Guard Base in Knoxville, Tenn., is a fairly new facility with an up-to-date fiber backbone. But by 1997, its distributed learning network had become woefully inadequate. A shared Ethernet ran the Vines network operating system from Banyan Systems Inc. of Westborough, Mass., connecting desktop 486 PCs with 8M of RAM each.
Cebrowski makes call for bottom-up IT
The federal government needs to take a more decentralized, bottom-up approach to information technology, according to Vice Adm. Arthur K. Cebrowski. Government takes a wholly integrated, control-oriented approach—something which many feel is generally inconsistent with the information age," he said last month in an acceptance speech at the GCN Awards Banquet in Washington.
PROFESSIONAL CALENDAR
18 Windows NT Security Conference. Langley, Va. Contact Federal Business Council Inc., 10810 Guilford Road, Suite 105, Annapolis Junction, Md. 20701; tel. 301-206-2940. 19-20 Multiple Award Contracting Conference. Washington. Contact Government Contracting Institute, Conference Department, 11300 Rockville Pike, Rockville, Md. 20852; tel. 800-260-1545. 20 Managing Change in Era of Uncertainty Symposium. Fairfax, Va. Contact American Management Systems Inc., 4050 Legato Road, Fairfax, Va. 22033; tel. 703-227-4246.
Military exchange shops savvy
The Army and Air Force Exchange Service is one of the world's biggest retail operations. "We are a monster," said Ovidio Trevino, section chief and supervisory computer systems analyst at the service's headquarters in Dallas. Boasting 8.7 million customers at military installations throughout the United States, Europe and the Pacific, and 50,000 employees, AAFES stores earned $337 million last year from sales of everything from home electronics to jewelry.
FEMA automates property inspection scheduling
A telephone registration process and a custom PC application let the Federal Emergency Management Agency help disaster victims begin rebuilding their homes, businesses and lives quickly. The process automates the sign-up for applying for aid. During phone interviews, FEMA agents gather the data in the PC application, which runs under Microsoft Windows NT 3.51. By using the teleregistration app, FEMA agents cut paperwork, said Glenn Garcelon, chief of FEMA's National Processing Services Center in Denton, Texas.
PowerPoint expert's secrets revealed
If a pot of strong coffee is the only thing that keeps listeners awake for your briefings, here's how to make a mundane presentation motivational. Microsoft PowerPoint 97 is one of the most robust presentation applications around. A few simple steps in PowerPoint can enliven even the dullest demonstration. Delve in just a bit deeper to bestow animation, sounds and actions that make a presentation jump off the screen.
Nine FBI systems professionals receive kudos for their successes
The FBI and GCN recently honored nine bureau employees for excellence in systems development, management and implementation of information technology. The FBI employees received their awards at the monthly GCN Forum luncheon in Washington. The bureau's new information technology environment supports major mission-critical administrative and investigative applications, including the Automated Case Support System, Bureau Personnel Management System and Financial Management System.
Olympus digital recorder: a good idea that gets lost in translation
TEST DRIVE Pros and cons: + Clever use of flash card as voice recorder - Voice recognition quality not yet acceptable Real-life requirements: Windows 9x, Pentium-class PC or notebook, 32M of RAM, CD-ROM drive, 125M free storage, sound card, PC Card slot What a great idea: Put a flash memory card into a tape recorder and use it like a miniature cassette to digitize and transfer spoken words to a computer.
SEC begins three-phase upgrade of its financial data filing system
The Securities and Exchange Commission has moved its electronic filing database and filing capabilities in-house, the first phase in a two-year modernization project. The Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retrieval system manages and stores financial data that publicly traded corporations must file with SEC. EDGAR data is stored on a server at Lexis-Nexis Corp. in Arlington, Va.
DISA establishes portal for telecom satellite system
HONOLULU—The Defense Information Systems Agency has installed a dedicated ground station here at the Naval Computer and Telecommunications Area Master Station-Pacific to act as a terrestrial gateway for Defense Department users of the $5 billion global Iridium cellular network. DISA bought the gateway from Iridium LLC, a consortium of international investors led by Motorola Inc. of Schaumburg, Ill., for about $15 million to handle nearly 2,000 simultaneous DOD users.
DISN to award multibillion dollar Pacific transmission services IDIQ
HONOLULU—The Defense Information Systems Agency is on track to award a 10-year, multibillion dollar Defense Information Systems Network Transmission Services-Pacific (DTS-P) contract early next year. DISA's DISN program office last year expanded DTS-P areas of coverage outside of the Pacific to include places not covered by the DISN-Continental United States and DISN-Europe contracts. The coverage includes the Pacific Command's and Southern Command's areas of responsibilities, such as Alaska, Hawaii, Australia, Guam, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Central
THE COMMUNITY
Packet Rat R. Fink Wouldn't you just know it? Microsoft Corp. went and changed the name of the operating system formerly known as NT—let's just say TOSFKANT. The new name: Windows 2000. The Rat wonders whether anyone at Microsoft learned anything from the Windows 95 fiasco. Putting an actual year in the name of a major revision of an operating system creates a misbegotten belief that it will ship before or during that
Army sets its sights on making ammo supply data easy to track
AMROTS pools data every six hours to give users up-to-date information about specific items. The Army this month will hand over new software tools to 3,000 ammunition supply personnel who have survived military downsizing. "I'm trying to get them some tools that make their job easier in today's trying times," said Geoff Myers, chief of the Army implementation team for the Defense Department's Joint Ammunition Management Standard System. Because the new Virtual DB tools
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