By Carl Estes
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Electronic Grants System is ready for governmentwide rollout in fall
Agencies can use the grants system without making major upgrades. After a successful nine-month pilot, the Federal Railroad Administration has received an additional $300,000 from the Government Information Technology Services Board Innovation Fund to build the full-scale Electronic Grants System, Transportation Department officials said. The $155,000 pilot had served partly as a demonstration showcase for object request broker software from Active Software Inc., a Santa Clara, Calif., startup.
PackRat 6.0 was no keeper, but 6.1 is worth saving
Pros and cons: +Drag-and-drop simplicity for e-mail and document management – Printouts need polish Real-life requirements: Win95 or NT 4.0, 16M RAM, 8M free on hard drive In 1993, Polaris Software Inc.'s PackRat was the government's personal information manager of choice. But many users moved on because PackRat 5.0 for Microsoft Windows had bugs, slow response and an imperfect interface.
Graphics and illustration software
—Robbie Smith, information management officer, the Army's concept analysis research facility, Bethesda, Md. "It's harder finding training on [Lotus Freelance Graphics 96] than it is on, say, Microsoft products. We've developed in-house training for it because there isn't as much commercial training available for Lotus products." —Paul Braunschweig, system engineer and team leader, Environmental Protection Agency, Denver
DOD brass expect some date code systems failures
Senior Defense Department officials have acknowledged that the department will not have all its systems year 2000-ready on time. Even systems that DOD has renovated and tested might fail come Jan. 1, 2000, Hamre said, and the failure of one system could affect others. "I will be the first to say that we are in for some nasty surprises," he said.
Navy stares down big problems
Researchers who use the new supercomputer installed at the Naval Research Laboratory all have very large problems, computationally speaking. The mission of the laboratory is somewhat akin to skating near the edge of the ice, and it explains why the Navy lab in Washington owns one of the few Cray Origin2000 128-processor computers in existence.
Energy lab boosts bandwidth
A Gigabit Ethernet connection links two Cisco 7513 routers to a Cisco Catalyst 5500 LAN switch at the heart of the network, which serves about 50 buildings. Eventually, 10 backbone routers will be upgraded to gigabit/sec rates. The Berkeley, Calif., lab is doing away with shared Ethernet connectivity to desktops PCs in favor of switched LAN links for about 9,500 devices.
Agencies soon can lease PCs through NIH buys
In advance of a pending General Accounting Office report on its contracting practices, the National Institutes of Health has announced plans to add PC leasing to its three large requirements contracts. The staff of the NIH Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center is working on the contract negotiations. NITAAC runs the agency's large indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contracts.
Asset Insight supplies latest data on your network
Asset Insight 2.5 collects data about networked clients to give managers a basis for making decisions, Tangram Enterprise Solutions Inc. officials said. Managers can send out agents from Asset Insight—contained in a 2M e-mail attachment or on diskette—that will conduct regular inventories of networked products. With the Desktop Management Interface-compliant application, the Cary, N.C., company supplies an Oracle Corp. relational database management system to store the collected data.
FAA, foreign delegates discuss, share date code fixes
Federal Aviation Administration officials are working with their international counterparts to help make their systems year 2000-ready, an FAA spokesman said. But some industry observers don't think FAA is moving quickly enough to ensure that data interfaces between the United States and foreign air systems will be ready for 2000 and beyond.
Medics go online for consults
In July 1996, a general surgeon aboard the USS Enterprise examined a 35-year-old sailor and diagnosed the man as having a malignant melanoma. But instead of calling for a medical evacuation, the medical corpsman reached for his digital camera. He e-mailed the National Naval Medical Center, attaching a digital photo of the infected area. After consulting with Capt. Dennis Vidmar at NNMC, the surgeon removed the growth the next day. The Navy estimated that by performing
SitePro database aids agency in cleanup of wetlands
The Fish and Wildlife Service is using information technology to bring paradise to a polluted California coastal wetland. The agency is using a database of scientific measurements taken from the Bolsa Chica Lowlands over the years to create a cleanup plan for the 880-acre site. The Southern California coastal marsh is home to endangered plants and animals.
CIO Council at odds over goals
Infighting in the federal Chief Information Officers Council has led at least one member to charge that the council is failing to show leadership on information technology issues. A division among council members over mandating agency use of the Information Technology Investment Portfolio System (I-TIPS) mirrors a broader debate over whether the council ought to set IT standards governmentwide.
Navy command awards contract for suite of tactical support apps
The Navy Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command recently awarded CACI Inc. of Fairfax, Va., a five-year $48 million contract for software, training and troubleshooting services for the Naval Tactical Command Support System. NTCSS is a suite of tactical support applications that provide shipboard systems users with administrative data management, maintenance resource management, supply and financial management, and automated medical systems support.
IG confirms: DMS will need AUTODIN for backup
The Defense Department inspector general this month confirmed what DOD officials have been saying for months: The Defense Message System will not fully replace AUTODIN by 2000. In a report, Readiness of the Defense Message System to Replace the Automatic Digital Network, the office of the IG concluded that DMS won't be ready on time to replace some critical AUTODIN messaging functions, including classified message processing and emergency action messages. The AUTODIN contract expires December of
White House sets up systems protection plan
The Clinton administration by year's end will complete its plan for protecting the nation's infrastructures from cyberattack, administration officials said. Clinton last month issued Presidential Decision Directive 63, which called for a national plan for infrastructure protection. The directive established the Critical Infrastructure Protection Program, which calls for interim security capability by 2000 and full infrastructure security in five years.
Successful IT planning goes well beyond 2000
With all the attention on the year 2000 and its urgent but short-lived—and overhyped—software repair issues, are agencies thinking enough about the real future, the one beyond the next 18 months? A number of scholars and writers think agencies need to think further ahead if they are to effectively serve a changing population.
PhoneJack shows upside of full-duplex call quality over Internet
Pros and cons: +Free phone calls with good to excellent sound quality – Works with most Internet telephony software and PBXes – Inherent delays from nature of Internet Real-life requirements: Open half-height ISA slot, Win95, 16M RAM, CD-ROM drive, 2M free on hard drive, telephone handset or speaker and microphone.
New chief NSF engineer says key to job is consensus
The National Science Foundation has named Eugene Wong its new assistant director for engineering. Wong replaces Joseph Bordogna, now acting deputy director of NSF. Wong was one of the designers of Ingres, an early relational database management system now sold by Computer Associates International Inc. He comes to NSF from a position as chief scientist at Vision Software Tools Inc. of Oakland, Calif.
TECH REFRESH
Indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contracts are shedding their reputation for cumbersome technical refreshment practices. That often means the prices drop fast. On its Army PC-2 contract, Government Technology Services Inc. has replaced a 266-MHz Pentium II PC with a 300-MHz Hewlett-Packard Co. Vectra VL7 Pentium II system, priced at $2,399 from the Chantilly, Va., reseller. That's $231 less than the older system, said Marlene Harold, PC-2 program manager at GTSI.
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