The Best of FOSE 2006

The 13 winners and two
grand prize winners of the Best of FOSE
Awards
at the 2006 FOSE trade show in

Washington

illustrate the ever growing role of technology in the federal government.

From servers to software to
handhelds, this year's products excelled in their innovation and ability to
assist with the evolving and complex work of government.

Best of Show winner Altiris
Software Virtualization Solution, for example, addresses the need for better
software management solutions. By placing applications and data into managed
units, Software Virtualization Solution lets IT managers activate, deactivate or
reset applications and avoid conflicts between applications?all
without altering the base Windows installation.

"The IT management space
in the federal government is growing every year," said Dan McManus, a systems
engineer for the federal space for Altiris Inc.,


Lindon
,
Utah

. "There have been things like the
Federal Information Security Management Act that have really pushed the security
aspects of IT management along."

Altiris' tool is not
specifically a security application, but it does help with security, McManus
said.

"You think that you have a
system pretty well locked down and somebody accidentally runs a freeware program
that mixes [Dynamic Link Library], and will break a core application," McManus
said. "Software Virtualization Solution gives you the ability, by layering it,
to actually put this into a posture of separating those things. So
if something did come along and break a core application, you would be able to
quickly reset that application while addressing any of the remediation issues
that you have."

The solution is similar to a
thin client architecture where IT management takes place from a central
location. But unlike a thin client,
the local machines actually have applications loaded onto them, said Rich
Bentley, product segment manager with Altiris.

"A thin client is really more
of a virtualization of the disc level," he said. "We're really
virtualizing the file system level."

That means Altiris' solution doesn't stream applications across a
network.

"What we're doing is the
application physically resides on the client machine, but when you put the
application down onto that client machine, you're not actually changing that
baseline," Bentley said.

"So in essence you do kind of
have a thin client, on the client end although you still have the application
loaded there locally it's just that the application doesn't make any changes
to the baseline," he said. "You get the best of both worlds because you can
still run the applications whether you're connected or disconnected to the
network because all the files and data are physically stored on that client
machine."

The other grand prize winner
was Kodak's Scan Station 100, a multipurpose device that enables multiple
users to digitally share documents within any network environment, said Tim
Vaughan, worldwide product marketing manager, Eastman Kodak Co.,

Rochester
,
N.Y

.

"More and more agencies are
driving towards digital communication,"

Vaughan

said.

Digital communication is
obviously more efficient than paper driven communication, he said. Moreover, several mandates require agencies to move to digital.

The Kodak scanner does not
require a dedicated computer and is designed to be used in a small to medium
office.

"When you're working in an
area that doesn't necessarily have access to IT support, and an area where
knowledge workers are trying to get a job done, that's the point at where you
want to capture the paper," Vaughan said.

"If you end up trying to
process the paper back at some central agency, you're adding delays and labor
costs to the whole process," he said. "If you get the folks dealing with
paper, right at a customer counter, to digitize it, now you've got digital
workflow."

Other vendors showing their
scanners at FOSE agreed that paper in offices is not going away anytime soon.

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