Water Resources Discipline ITAC Activities

The latest Information Technology Advisory Committee meeting was held on June 10-12 in the Pennsylvania District Office in New Cumberland, PA. The web link with the minutes of the meeting is at:

http://water.usgs.gov/usgs/itac/minutes/minutes_index.html

Notable items:

1. The IT hardware contract for both desktops and laptops was awarded to Dell. The microsoft agreement can be found at: http://nttac.usgs.gov/index.asp?url=Ent_Agreement_revised.html
2. OSW is providing money for the SLEDS software to be modified for the USGS sediment labs.
3. Ernest Dreyer is serving on a committee to study the need and potential location of a NESDIS backup location.
4. The future of ITAC will be a topic of discussion at the next Senior Staff meeting.
5. The next planned ITAC meeting is October 7-9 in the SD District Office and at the EROS Data Center.

ITAC recommendations:

1. ITAC recognizes that in the advent of DIS reorganization, reliance on the Regional Computer Specialists (RCSers) by WRD will increase. RCSers will continue to be critical resources for the support of NWIS, as well as other Office of Information initiatives. Also, RCSers will become the focal points of WRD science center IT issues.

2. ITAC supports the migration of certain fuctions of the WRD DIS office to the Bureau's Chief Technology Officer (CTO) supervision that have a scope larger than WRD as outlined in the "Final Report of the Scientific Services Committee", with the documented concern of the potential drop of the level of service to WRD. ITAC strongly insists WRD-focused functions, such as NWIS support, SunTAC, field computing efforts, and WRD water web projects remain under WRD supervision.

3. ITAC believes that the NESDIS GOES DCS, and the current DCS backup study, is critical to the WRD mission. ITAC recommends that OSW put high priority in completing the draft letter requesting that the GOES DCS be authorized as a National Critical Infrastructure (NCI) system, and that this draft letter be presented through Bob Hirsch for signature by Director Chip Groat.

4. ITAC supports the Sametime comparison to Raindance (Web conferencing software packages) with a test of a large attendee group with the goal of making suggestions to WRD and/or the USGS.

5. ITAC's role of providing a feedback mechanism between the Districts and the WRD Senior Staff/Office of Information and the Bureau's Chief Technology Officer becomes even more critical with the proposed migration of several DIS functions to the CTO office, and therefore, recommends that a member of the new CTO office, preferably the current DIS office chief, maintain a permanent membership on ITAC.

Selected highlights related to web services:

1. HTML Editors Compared -- Adobe Go Live 6.0 and Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 6.1 were compared. Testers preferred Dreamweaver's interface somewhat, but recognize that both of these HTML editors have the same functionality. Currently GoLive is $48 on the Adobe Contract vs. over $200 as GSA price for Dreamweaver. DIS has been asked to explore negotiating a better contract for Dreamweaver. An official statement recommending the use of these HTML editors is being drafted.

2. Adobe Contract Renewal -- The CAPP is working to renew the Adobe software contract. Quotes have been received, and a four-year contract award is expected by the end of this month.

3. Computer Security and the WWW -- Many computer security issues were discussed at the meeting. It was agreed that the best way to ensure secure web services is to migrate to NatWeb. The Bureau CTO, Kevin Gallagher, restated his support for the NatWeb effort during this meeting. [Note that since the meeting, an eastern region server critical to updating NatWeb pages was down for several days last week. NatWeb met to consider how to reconfigure to avoid this failure point. Accessing web pages to read was up the whole time. The outage only affected pages needing ]updating during that period.}

Sonya A. Jones, Studies Chief
US Geological Survey
8027 Exchange Drive
Austin, Texas 78754

Work phone (512)927-3557
Mobile phone (512)779-5465
Fax (512)927-3590
sajones@usgs.gov