Stat-USA plans all-PC network
To drive down the cost of providing statistical economic data to businesses worldwide, a small Commerce Department program plans to move its work exclusively to a PC network. For now, the Stat-USA program hosts its World Wide Web pages from two Sun Microsystems Inc. Sparcserver 10 workstations. But the goal is to shift to a PC-only network running Windows NT.
OMB: Cut your data centers or lose '98 funds
The Office of Management and Budget will use the president's fiscal 1998 budget proposal to force agencies to make consolidation and outsourcing decisions about their ADP operations. In the coming weeks, as push comes to shove over which data centers will remain open, OMB and agency officials said 1998 funding will become a compelling factor.
DII hits international markets
Software products that comprise the Defense Information Infrastructure are in demand by U.S. military allies and coalition partners. For instance, Canada has bought parts of the Global Command and Control System. Japan, Australia and Saudi Arabia are reviewing the GCCS components. And the United Kingdom likes the looks of the Defense Department's new Common Operating Environment.
Help (4.6) arrives at help desk
Help 4.6 from GWI Software Inc. has streamlined help desk operations for the Division of Systems and Network Management at the Health and Human Services Department's Information Technology Service in Rockville, Md. Help works with Lotus Development Corp.'s Notes groupware. Callers to the 20-employee help desk first speak with a technician, who logs in a ticket for each call in Help. A self-building knowledge base in the software from GWI, of Vancouver, Wash., then suggests
Eye-catching Web art just got easier
Microsoft Image Composer is an exception. This graphics manipulation package is designed expressly to create images for on-screen display. It's truly powerful, fairly intuitive and lots of fun to use. Image Composer comes as part of Microsoft's FrontPage 97 Bonus Pack with 700 pieces of clip art and photographs. You can download Image Composer, sans clip art, for free from Microsoft's World Wide Web site at http://www.microsoft.com.
Visual Basic edition opens ActiveX for all users
One of the most difficult assignments for a PC programmer is to produce working ActiveX controls. Microsoft announced ActiveX as the replacement for Object Linking and Embedding, and for months afterward hardly anyone outside the company could get an ActiveX control to work. Microsoft's Developer's Studio gave plenty of examples, but it seemed only a sharp C++ programmer could produce properly functioning controls.
If you can keep it running, Office 97 is full of goodies
Office 97 Professional ranks among Microsoft Corp.'s most progressive and most frustrating upgrades. Let me praise it before I recount the woes of getting it to work reliably. This successor to the leading office suite came out with fanfare second only to the launch of Windows 95, and with good reason:
Through $1.5 billion PCHS, VA will forge global network
VA awarded its Procurement of Computer Hardware and Software this month to Digital Equipment Corp. of Maynard, Mass., and Sysorex Information Systems Inc. of Fairfax, Va. VA officials touted PCHS, pronounced ''peaches,''as the largest civilian agency hardware and software buy. Under the five-year contract, which has one base year and four option years, the two companies will continue the networking work VA began under the $298 million Nationwide Office Automation for the VA contract held
Bid evaluations should avoid a neutral rating for past performance
In the Federal Acquisition Regulation Part 15 rewrite, the policy drafters added past performance information that sets no guidelines on defining past performance. According to the current FAR treatment, past performance is ''one indicator of an offeror's ability to perform the contract successfully.''How informative. The current FAR also tells us that a lack of past performance should result in ''a neutral evaluation for past performance.''The proposed rewrite defines a neutral evaluation as ''any assessment that
Feds take a wait'n'see attitude on MMX
Agencies are in no hurry to buy Pentium MMX PCs. Several agency users said the applications and the track record do not yet exist to encourage big buys of Pentium PCs that have Intel Corp.'s new chip set with multimedia extensions. Some high-end scientific users plan to use the PCs sooner, but most federal users said they want to see more administrative applications available before making the investment.
For the record, buyers: Check the fine print of the ABCs of CDs
Government buyers should keep an eye on CD-ROM advances if they don't want to get caught in a couple of years as the proud owners of the only remaining technology-X drives. Digital video (or versatile) disks, or DVDs, are getting a big marketing push this year. Even though there's an accepted industry standard for read-only DVD (DVD-ROM), don't look for writable or rewritable DVD-RAM to become widely available for another two years.
Cohen will face IT leadership void at Defense
Now that William Cohen has cleared the congressional confirmation gauntlet, one of his first jobs as Defense secretary will be filling an information technology management void. The Defense Department soon will lose its two senior systems chiefs, Emmett Paige Jr. and Lt. Gen. Albert J. Edmonds. It is an ironic fate for Cohen, who last year as a senator crafted the most sweeping federal IT management reform legislation in 30 years.
Agencies in need of media-neutral docs should try out SGML
Are you ready to shift your World Wide Web site into neutral? The growing popularity of ''media-neutral'' publishing systems is beginning to have a big impact on the way documents are created for storage on Web servers. The idea: Store all your agency's documents in one format in a back-end document management system. Then retrieve them over your intranet for easy updates, and convert them on the fly for Web or CD-ROM publication.
Symantec search utilities help mine the Net for gold
The main utility is WebFind. It submits your search criteria to several World Wide Web search engines at once for multiple online searches, when one well-thought-out search might have been adequate. Such products needlessly take up Web resources. WebFind does its job well, though, removing duplicate entries and putting search results in order.
Steve Jobs envisions a Rhapsody in Yellow for Apple's comeback
Isaac Newton would be surprised at how far from the tree Apple Computer Inc. has fallen. Gravity took a toll on Apple in the early 1990s, but recently there are signs of new life. Apple's acquisition of Next Inc. and its NextStep operating system could help rebuild a technologically sound foundation for the Cupertino, Calif., company. I'm excited about this, because I think the industry needs Apple.
FCC charges for online bidding
The Federal Communications Commission has generated more than $20 billion for the Treasury in two years, auctioning pieces of the personal communications services spectrum. Part of the cost of the electronic auctions is defrayed by charging bidders for access to an FCC server from their PCs over a 900-number telephone service.
It's back to the blackboard for Bill Chou
Wushow "Bill" Chou left his post as the Treasury Department's chief information officer this month and returned to academic life after being at the vortex of several sweeping changes in federal information technology policy. Chou oversaw the early implementation of the Information Technology Management and Reform Act, increased congressional scrutiny of IRS' troubled Tax Systems Modernization program and the cutover to a new departmentwide communications network in the three years he was deputy assistant secretary of
New backbone pumps up DISN
Defense Department users can look forward to faster e-mail, file transfers and World Wide Web surfing after the Defense Information Systems Network's transition to an asynchronous transfer mode backbone and consolidated multiplexer access. DISN supplies the global wide area backbone for NIPRnet and SIPRnet-the Nonclassified IP Router Network and the Secret IP Router Network for sensitive data. DISN also serves the smaller Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications Network, or JWICS.
Task force says DOD must spend $3 billion on InfoSec
The government needs to pump $3 billion into the Defense Department budget to fortify the nation's information infrastructure against hackers, terrorists and other information warfare threats, a DOD task force has recommended. In the report issued this month, a Defense Science Board task force said these funds would cover the establishment of a central information warfare operations center, the creation of a joint office for system, network and infrastructure design, and other costs to carry out
Multimedia and portability advance in '97
Happy computing, '97 style. The year begins with good news for power users. Intel Corp. last week released its newest Pentiums that include multimedia instructions-thanks to the much-heralded MMX chip. There's little software yet that invokes the new instructions, but even existing applications will run an average of 10 percent faster. Expect to see desktop and portable systems from all the major vendors.
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