Water Resources Division ITAC Home Page

Dear ITAC,

In trying to summarize the Montgomery ITAC meeting minutes for NC District distribution, I contacted Mindy Lanza regarding the BASIS+/FFS conference call. Mindy -- in the midst of various close-out emergencies -- kindly took time to clarify the FFS issue.

The following is a summary of the BASIS+/FFS issue, as edited by Mindy --

The Branch of Financial Management -- specifically, John Walbert -- stated that the Bureau plans to stop automatic distribution of FFS reports via ftp by the end of this calendar year. He called ftp an old technology, and said that it took too much effort to keep up with changing field office ID.s, passwords, and systems and to retransmit the FFS reports manually when something changes at the local level.

When asked, John stated that FFS reports wouldn.t be available in electronic form in the near term. Field offices will have to set up a remote printer for FFS. Local administrative personnel log onto the NBC Mainframe and use Control-D (a software package) to specify which reports they want sent to their local FFS-configured printer. The systems staff is investigating adding an option to Control-D that will allow reports to be pulled into an Excel database in the future.

Either Crystal Reports or Oracle Discover can be used to generate ad hoc reports from FFS. These tools will allow retrieved data to be stored locally in electronic form. Such data would be suitable for use in spreadsheets.

Eventually, expenditures reports will be available via BASIS+.

Should the above replace the meeting minutes now on-line? Specifically, should the single paragraph below the attendees list, the question, and the answer be removed and replaced with the above? The on-line minutes -- and the BASIS+ discussion occurred at 2:00 pm on Wednesday afternoon.

Thank you in advance for your consideration.

Nelson Williams
Supervisory IT Specialist
U.S. Geological Survey
3916 Sunset Ridge Road
Raleigh, NC 27607
(919) 571-4099