Water Resources Division ITAC Home Page

WRD Senior Staff Constituents Report, March 11, 2003

Please find the minutes of the last ITAC meeting that occurred February 11-13th in San Juan, PR located at the following URL:   /cpac/minutes/030211PR_agenda.html

Kevin Gallagher our CTO, attended and stayed for the entire meeting. Therefore, ITAC had the opportunity to address many of Water's concerns directly to Kevin and discuss ramifications to our districts and water programs of various DOI decisions. ITAC also prepared statements regarding managing Lotus more effectively and migrating Web content to NatWeb. These have been sent forward as memos to the CTO and the District Chiefs respectively. Water has an active interest in evaluating the deployment of Active Directory and is recommending through ITAC that AD not be managed from a single central domain server at least until the network problems are resolved. Districts have a need to operate even when the network is down. In the interim, DIS has provided guidance on deploying AD. ITAC was briefed on the Microsoft Enterprise Agreement by Paul Exter (MD District). This agreement is for upgrades the to the Microsoft suite on any computer or (nonscientific ) laptop and, may not save USGS any actual costs, because we will be paying for the OS and then upgrades through the agreement. Hopefully, there will be savings in managing a more configured system of computers. An additional concern brought to the attention of ITAC is that costs to true up will be added costs in the future paid up front. Paul will continue to provide information to ITAC and seek input.

ITAC holds monthly conference calls. The next scheduled ITAC meeting is in Rapid City SD in October. ITAC is considering holding a face-to-face meeting in the NR in June.

Katherine
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Katherine Lins
Acting Chief, Office of Information, WRD
U.S. Geological Survey
440 National Center
Reston, VA 20192
703-648-5014
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