Tech
   Talks

Learn more about how the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) are being used to modernize GSA applications. Hear about completed projects and projects on the horizon.

The goal is to transform agency systems from proprietary technologies to open source.

Transformation will simplify integrations with other systems; enable greater agility, resiliency, scalability, and performance, reduce the risk of scarce resource/talent pool and in long term lower the cost of operations, improve the quality of product, and help drive cultural change.

Traditional approaches to IT network security are based on the castle-and-moat concept. In castle-and-moat security, it is hard to obtain access from outside the network, but once inside the network, users are more or less considered trusted.

The problem with this approach is that once an attacker gains access to the network, they have more free reign over everything inside.

Zero Trust Network (ZTN) security is an IT security framework that requires strict identity verification for every person and device trying to access resources on a private network, regardless of whether they are sitting within or outside of the network perimeter.

No single specific technology is associated with zero trust; it is a holistic approach to network security that incorporates several different principles and technologies. In this tech talk, we introduce Zero Trust Network and GSA’s roadmap towards this security framework.

Amazon WorkSpaces enables the provision of virtual, cloud-based Microsoft Windows or Amazon Linux desktops for GSA user community, known as WorkSpaces. Amazon WorkSpaces eliminates the need to procure and deploy hardware or install complex software.

We can quickly add or remove users as the needs change. Users can access their virtual desktops from multiple devices or web browsers.

Amazon WorkSpaces provides the flexibility of either monthly or hourly billing for WorkSpaces. For Windows desktops, there's an option to bring your own licenses and applications or purchase them from the AWS Marketplace for Desktop Apps

This talk is an overview of the Historic Building Documentation Resource (HBDR), also known as the BPP transition project. PBS-IT is currently managing the development of the HBDR interface for use by both the Center for Historic Buildings and supporting project teams assessing and rehabilitating historic buildings.

The goal is to offer a simplified solution for management of BPP data and related supporting documents while leveraging the power of the EDMS Alfresco environment.

We will review several of these capabilities today designed in Alfresco for the HBDR interface which contribute to the ease of BPP management and increased productivity for users.

To mark Data Privacy Day, on January 29th, GSA will host a Privacy Tech Talk featuring the Chief Privacy Officer of the National Security Agency (NSA), Becky Richards and Technical Director of the NSA Privacy Office, Akbar Siddiqui. They will share guidance on how to ethically use Artificial Intelligence within federal agencies.

Richard Speidel, who is the Chief Privacy Officer at GSA, will also provide an introduction to this Tech Talk.

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are terms that have received quite a bit of attention in recent years.

GSA is in the early phases of deploying machine learning to provide business value.

In this tech talk, we will discuss some examples of how machine learning is being used in industry and at GSA.

In this first of upcoming BPM related Tech Talks, you will learn about optimizing your organizational processes through simulation with Trisotech, an enterprise tool suite.

Author and Enterprise Architect practitioner Dr. Joshua Fuehrer will discuss how you can use Trisotech to model and simulate to-be changes to business processes in order to examine if desired changes will make an impact. Josh will dive into Trisotech capabilities for simulation and provide an in-depth look at how you can lead within your organisation to help transform their business model; from both an efficiency and effectiveness perspective.

We are looking to continue this BPM topic in future tech talks which will include case management, capability or strategic management, and decision modeling.

As technology has evolved and federal space has been reduced, the need for managing both physical and electronic records has grown in scale and complexity. In response to these challenges, EDMS Record Management Module helps GSA comply with federal records management statutes and regulations.

The Records Management Module (RMM) is a fully integrated component of the EDMS application and has already been utilized to declare over 3 million GSA documents as records, and growing.

On the tech Talk, there will be a demo of the RMM module, how content is declared a record and also what has been declared a record and how the RMM aligns with the NARA RM initiative.

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are a valuable method to share data with mobile apps, websites, and computer systems. GSA publishes many Public APIs for use outside of GSA. We also have many Non-Public APIs that are used to share functionality or data between GSA systems.

There is even a group inside GSA named the "GSA API Guild" that is dedicated solely to API best practices.

This tech talk will give a brief overview of APIs, along with an update on the agency's activity with APIs in 2019 and goals for 2020.

Code.gov is the federal government's primary platform for aggregating Open Source Software.

With over 6000 OSS projects made available, Code.gov offers you the opportunity to discover and use thousands of available projects.

Join Code.gov director, Joe Castle, and lead engineer, Sara Cope, to learn more about Open Source Software, the Federal Source Code Policy, and updates to the Open Source Pilot Program.

This talk will also include a walk-through of the Code.gov platform.

The Rules of Play: Creativity and Constraint in the US Web Design System

Designing and building a new government website or digital service requires both coherence with a practical, consistent baseline of user-friendly experience across government and the flexibility to adapt to the specific needs of your mission and audience.

The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) is a digital design toolkit that helps teams achieve both these goals. We’ll take a look at how a design system like USWDS makes agile, iterative development faster, cheaper, and even more fun.

Jamf Pro is a comprehensive management suite for the Macintosh computer platform, and we use it at GSA to manage all our Macs.

The objective of this talk is to introduce you to Jamf Pro, to show you what it does, how it works, and how we utilize it at GSA to manage our Macs.

GSA IT, working in partnership with the Office of Administrative Services, developed a solution in support of email records management (ERM).

ERM is important because maintaining messages beyond the records retention period poses a risk to the agency through eDiscovery.

The ERM working group developed a procedure of expunging from the GSA email system messages that are older than seven fiscal years.

So that users may preserve any of those older messages for personal reference use, GSA IT developed a Chrome extension that allows users to save those message outside the GSA email system--in this case Google Drive.

The Chrome extension saves messages as PDF documents and includes any attachments in their native form.

Without this tool users will have to print each message as PDF and manually combine with any attachments to store outside GSA email system.

The Mulesoft Anypoint Platform focuses on unlocking data and building an application network via an API driven approach.

The Anypoint Platform is a suite of tools that allows users to develop, deploy, manage, secure and collaborate on APIs.

GSA is currently leveraging Mulesoft for Salesforce provisioning and there are projects underway in PBS and OGP.

Activiti, part of the EDMS platform, is an enterprise Business Process Management (OA) solution with the flexibility and scalability to handle a wide variety of workflow processes within GSA.

It provides a powerful suite of end user tools and integrates with a range of enterprise systems to allow for cross team/cross platform workflows.

Teams such as Occupancy Agreements (OA) and Digital Signatures (DSS) rely on Activiti as it's workflow engine. Close integration with Alfresco allows workflows to drive compliance and records activity.

Provide an overview of Sprint-based Requirements and how the Platform Solutions team (ICPA) applies it to development projects.

Sprint-based Requirements allow IT teams to work closely with their customers to collect requirements and create user stories following a typical agile sprint format that run for two weeks with defined business topics and scope to discover during the sprints.

This format ensures that the ICPA team has a proper understanding of how to setup Salesforce standard objects, configure workflows, and setup reports / dashboards based on the needs of the business line.

This talk is an overview of the GSA Readily Available Computing Environment (GRACE).

The GRACE is a cloud broker, designed for DevSecOps teams with a high level of technical proficiency.

We will go over GRACE capabilities today.

Also we will go over what will be improved, and what GRACE will be sharing with the greater community in the future.

Alfresco is the software behind EDMS.

The Tech Talk will be about the Upgrading of Alfresco to Version 6.0 and the additional attributes we gain by using it.

Tentatively scheduled for release later this summer.

A Tour of GitHub for Non-Developers: GitHub is a collaboration platform where users can work on open source projects together.

In this session, we’ll take a look at the many GitHub features and get you up to speed with version control terminology.

We’ll also take a look at a few workflows in GitHub for contributing to open source projects without coding.

This is a beginner friendly session for someone who has little to no experience with GitHub.

Identifying the right problem to solve is often overlooked when planning a new project. Problems are often framed as, we need to achieve compliance with "X" rather than our solution should make it easier to comply with "X".

Going about this process in a systematic way can be a challenge, it's not every day that you work to tackle the big problems within an organization.

Sprint is a book written by two ex-Googler's who undertook many such challenges when working with clients to transform the way they work.

Sprint focuses on a 5 day, intensive set of sessions to break down issues, center the team on the right problems to solve, and produce prototypes quickly.

Mac computers have become the go to tool for analysts and developers throughout GSA.

The Mac Attack Tech Talk will be centered around providing a current overview of Macs in the GSA environment and how they are supported, recent end user survey results, and the User Acceptance Testing process.

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are a valuable way to share data with mobile apps, websites, and computer systems. GSA publishes many APIs for use by the public and GSA programs

But how do we make sure that GSA's APIs are high quality, secure, and consistent with each other? And how do we help people find and use our APIs?

This presentation will share the details of GSA's API Strategy, and the three areas we are focused on to make it a reality: External Customer Experience, Internal Engagement, and Technical Architecture.

Many of us use the GSA EA Analytics and Reporting (GEAR) site as a source of rich information pertaining to GSA business application, FISMA systems, and IT standards.

However, any data is only reliable if it is regularly reviewed and updated. For this reason, the Enterprise Architecture team has created the GEAR Manager page, which provides an intuitive interface for users to quickly edit and update their data in GEAR and see these updates on the site in real time.

Please join us in this Tech Talk as the EA team discusses everything about the GEAR Manager page, from requesting access to making your first edits.

This tech talk will cover two related topics

First we'll discuss Agile basics and how to get started in adopting Agile practices, as well as some of the benefits. Second, we'll outline some ways in which Agile practices can enhance accountability and transparency.

Qualtrics is a customer experience management platform that allows users to create surveys, dashboards, and graphics, in addition, to analyze and synthesize data.

This presentation will focus on Qualtrics as a platform and how to effectively create a survey. Surveys should be built with the user in mind, utilizing best practices based on behavioral science research

Responding correctly to the National Alert and Accountability System (NAAS) notification messages is important for GSA’s accountability.

This tech talk will discuss details of notification types and your responsibility in responding>

Lightning Experience is Salesforce’s intuitive, intelligent interface, designed to support the way you work and help you be more productive.

With Lightning users can find insights more quickly, work more efficiently, and be connected across all devices.

During the Lightning Experience Tech Talk, Annie Egan from the ICPA team, will provide an overview about what Lightning is, highlight new and exciting features of the interface and discuss the Salesforce COE’s strategy for transitioning GSA to Lightning.

This presentation will focus on account and network security for teleworkers.

We'll discuss keeping your networks and accounts safe.

We will also provide Information on the measures that should be in place as a teleworker.

Join us for some basic home user tips on remaining data aware and keeping the cyber criminals out.

Google Hangouts Closed Captioning and related features Tech Talk

Learn how to close caption a video to post to InSite or gsa.gov.

Learn a shortcut using Google Drive and Caption Colorado if distributing via email.

Join us for this informative tech talk

This presentation will focus on how the home user can work safely using their GFE mobile device as well as their BYOD and personally owned mobile device

We will also discuss some of the basic requirements in operating these devices in the various operating environments.

Please join us for some basic mobile device safety tips to help protect GSA's data as well as your own.

What’s new with IT Standards?

The IT Standards team is back!! We want to share updates, proposed changes, and tips to make the approval process easier.

Did you know that not all IT requests need to go through the approval process? How are we working to improve the GEAR IT Standards list? Can I search for an approved software by using the Category?

The IT Standards team wants to hear from you! Please join us at the Tech Talk and bring your questions.

We look forward to seeing you on October 25th!

This Tech Talk presentation will focus on how the home GSA user can work safely on their computers; both Government Furnished Equipment (GFE) and personally owned computers.

We will discuss the ways in which you can connect safely to GSA’s network and applications while remaining data aware.

Join us for some basic home user tips to aid you in working safely and keeping the cyber criminals out.

Did you know?

Use case of GIS enterprise tools: GSA Publishes First Map of Executive Branch-owned and Controlled Real Property

GSA published recently a geographic information system (GIS)-enabled map of the federal government’s centralized inventory of real property.

The Federal Real Property Profile (FRPP) Management System data, lists property under the custody and control of executive branch agencies, and is posted in accordance with the Federal Assets Sale and Transfer Act of 2016 and represents the federal government’s inventory as of September 30, 2017.

The interactive map includes search and filter capabilities to view and assess the federal government’s real property holdings.

The public can use the tool to search for federal property in a certain geographic area, sort by federal agency and access information including whether the property is utilized, underutilized or not utilized.

Robotics Process Automation (RPA) is automation of a manual process that is largely rules based, structured, and repetitive using software robots (bots).

There are two pilots being conducted at GSA right now.

Come join us to learn more about this technology and how GSA stood up a working solution for a pilot and learn where we are headed next!

Learn more about how the Taxonomy is used and managed within the GSA EDMS (Electronic Document Management System). We will pick up the discussion where we left off in the previous EDMS Tech Talk and Taxonomy Tech Talk.

During the presentation, we will focus on the EDMS Team’s taxonomy governance process by showing how changes to terms and structure are identified and implemented.

Finally, we will discuss how GSA can readily use and share existing taxonomies and authority control sources to enhance metadata and achieve interoperability.

Learn more about the GSA's EDMS system and how you can use it to help formalize the way you manage documents and electronic records.

During this presentation, we will explain what an EDMS is and how it can help your organization be more efficient. We will also explain the difference between EDMS and Google Drive and when you should use each tool.

Finally, we will show the process for moving your content onto the EDMS so that you can prepare to work with the EDMS team if you are interested.

Have you ever been interested in machine learning but didn't know how to start? Lindsay Young will share her tribulations in making a simple machine learning app.

She'll go over how it works and what code libraries are available for exploration. You will get an understanding of what situations make for good machine learning opportunities, and how to evaluate your options to know if you should use it for a given task

The Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) Program is coming to GSA! This new program, to be implemented across all Executive Branch agencies, will standardize the way agencies mark, handle, and share information that is unclassified but requires protection. Types of information that will be affected include PII, SBU, legal info, contracts, bids, etc. Tune in July 17th to learn more about the program and implementation plans for GSA.

GRACE is the new GSA enterprise cloud platform offering. The platform offers near full automation of IaaS capability to quickly on-board new tenants and empower them with self-provisioning capability.

So, what is it, how does it work, and how can you get started with it? Kishore from the CTO team will provide information on the core principles, architecture details, automation workflow, and core components of the GRACE platform.

We will talk about “why GRACE?” and compare it with other GSA’s IaaS offerings. We will also briefly touch on “incremental ATO process”, which is being developed in collaboration with the security team to build GRACE platform.

This is another interesting Tech Talk related to the topic of the Cloud!

Andrew Starling (IAE) and Dan Perkins (GSA IT Section 508 team) have worked together in conducting Section 508 testing during the design and development of beta.sam.gov.

This Tech Talk will provide an overview of their Section 508 testing processes and how they complement each other.

Mark Buchko (GSA IT Section 508 team) will also give an overview of the automated testing tool AMP (Accessibility Management Platform by Level Access) that is available to everyone in GSA.

This is the second tech talk related to the topic of IT Standards.

Cloud.gov is the TTS-operated platform-as-a-service for the federal government.

So, what is it, how does it work, and how can you get started with it?

Peter with the cloud.gov team will walk you through deploying a database-backed web application, and illustrate how cloud.gov is different from other cloud offerings.

In particular, the Cloud Foundry-based PaaS offloads much of the work that IaaSes require for security and compliance -- saving you money and vastly speeding up time to delivery.

Everyone talks about the Cloud and how it is important in the present and the future. Have you ever wondered where GSA IT is headed in the area of the Cloud?

Do you know that GSA will be using SaaS, IaaS and PaaS?

Navin will explain where we are and where we are heading in this technology frontier.

Come join us for the unveiling of the GSA-IT Cloud Strategy!

Have you ever needed a new software loaded onto your work laptop?

Where do you start, who do you contact, what information do you even need to begin?

Never fear the GSA IT Standards team is here!!

We will take you through the steps of acquiring the software you need. We will start in GEAR searching through GSA approved software that can be used, to searching GEAR for an alternative that may meet your need.

We will discuss our 'New Software' request form, talk about why we ask the questions we do, and how your responses can assist us in moving your ticket through the approval process.

We want to share with you the steps we must complete, the reviews that are required, and the approvals that must be acquired.

We also want to hear from you, so join us on April 26th and bring your questions

Below is this Tech Talk’s Objective. All are welcome, but it is a more Technical topic than most Tech Talks

Milner's slogan "Well typed programs can't go wrong" characterizes type-safe computation

Strongly typed languages with static type checking allow both parametric polymorphism and lifting their logic to the type system. This constructive logic is sound and complete. UML templates allow us to represent such type-safe computation in a technical architecture.

Rick will introduce parametric and logical types for programming and architecture with examples from both Java Generics and UML templates. Participants are encouraged to read Rick's paper "Parametric and Logical Types for Model-Driven Engineering" before the talk.

We will discuss the results of industrial research on static type systems used by Facebook (Flow) and Microsoft (TypeScript) with JavaScript. We will identify adoption risk of weakly and dynamically typed languages such as Perl, PHP and Python.

Paper: Parametric and Logical Types for Model-Driven Engineering

Digital Signatures Solutions (DSS) is THE enterprise wide secure signing solution in GSA today!

This tool that is used to incorporate digital signatures on all paperless transactions is known as e-SignLive..

We offer vanilla out of the box solutions to those who need it, as well as customized and integrated and API driven solutions for those who require more specific customization depending on their use case.

As of today, we have 3000+ users

We offer informal, need based individual training to user groups. These meetings are held using Adobe meeting space and can have a number of attendees ranging from 2 to close to 200. Come to the Digital Signature Solutions Tech Talk to learn more about how this product can help you and your organization.

Have you ever read an IT Strategic Plan with jargon and buzzwords that left you scratching your head and saying, "What did I just read?". When was the last time you referenced an IT Strategic Plan and remembered the goals, mission, or vision? An IT Strategic Plan should be clear, concise, and understandable to all audiences.

For our latest GSA IT Strategic Plan (FY 2018-2020,) GSA IT used a new strategic planning approach based on the industry best practice, Balanced Scorecard. The Balanced Scorecard is a system that connects an organization's strategy with performance management and simplifies how we communicate what we are trying to accomplish. A key principle of the Balanced Scorecard is how we view our IT strategy through four perspectives - customers, stewardship ($), internal processes, and organization growth (our people, tools, and technology).

This TechTalk will discuss the new strategic planning process we took to develop the GSA IT Strategic Plan and involve over 75+ employees in the strategy sessions.

We'll quickly walk through how to request an InSite page. Then provide a quick overview of GSA's style guides that include federal guidelines and laws that you must keep in mind when creating online content.

Finally, we'll show how helping customers complete their tasks on your InSite pages can improve customer satisfaction, and improve productivity and efficiency.

Slides will be shared that will go into more depth and include:

• analyzing InSite page visits with Google Analytics
• analyzing searches and using the results to understand your customer's keywords
• improving your InSite pages' Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• using a shortcut - like insite.gsa.gov/myprogram - as an easy way to communicate with your customers and improve your branding
• using customer feedback - like "Rate This Page" to continuously improve your Insite pages by using the voices of your customer

If you're mystified by InSite and don't know where to start this talk is for you.

Do you ever wonder how applications are synced across multiple devices? How you are able to receive instant updates to your mobile apps? This is possible because of Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs. APIs are software programs that enable computer programs and systems to talk directly to each other.

If you would like to understand how APIs work, then this Tech Talk is for you! Ryan Day and Joe Castle of IC and the GSA Digital Service team are going to explain APIs with particular focus on data transfer over web protocols and RESTful design with considering endpoints, nouns, and verbs. They will also demonstrate popular commercial and GSA examples while discussing the value they provide to the Agency and end consumers. Furthermore, information will be provided about GSA's API strategy, API inventory, and API standards for those wanting to create APIs.

IT applications are getting more robust and complicated each year. Applications developers are expected to deliver more features while improving application performance for end users.

This can be a challenging endeavor without the right tool to baseline and track application performance and identify where the bottlenecks are occurring.

During this tech talk, Phil Klokis and Allen Samuel will present how PB-ITS has used Riverbed ARX to improve application performance and identify usage of the application in supporting application rationalization activities.

As organizations embark on Agile transformation, many traditional project managers or business and technical leads are often assigned the Product Owner role with limited (or no) training or even an understanding of what the new role truly entails. In the midst of changing environments, conflicting mindsets, and other change-related issues, they are expected to start operating within a Scrum team after a few days of CSPO training and perhaps some reading. So, what are some of the tools and real-life experience required from a Product Owner?

During this Tech Talk, Alicia Cyrus will explore the differences between product ownership and traditional project management, and share some approaches on how Product Owners can effectively manage relationships and the responsibilities of their new role.

Did you know that PBS at GSA uses The Internet of Things for Their Smart Buildings? The next Tech Talk on May 17th at 1 pm will have GSA-PBS IT’s Charles Matta and Andrew Vanjani sharing their insights into this very exciting topic.

They will talk about PBS and smart buildings, and The Internet of Things within the building industry, PBS, Federal Facilities and the real estate industry. How it works, Applications, Risks/Rewards, Cybersecurity, Contracting, Innovation and Opportunities will all be discussed.

Version control software allows multiple people to manage changes to a project at the same time without getting in each other's way. At GSA, we use it to help share and collaborate on open source software but it can be used for many other things as well. In this session, we'll talk about the basics of version control, look at how you might use it on your projects and take a tour of the GitHub ecosystem. This is a beginners session and no coding experience is required.

Please join Sara Cope from the CTO Office in this Tech Talk for a friendly introduction to Version Control and GitHub.

DevOps is a growing collection of practices that unify software development, QA, IT operations, and security. These practices are primarily focused on two areas: cultural change and process automation. By applying DevOps principles to our IT products, we can realize better product quality, lower costs, shorter lead time to release changes, increased reliability, and happier customers.

Please join Jeff Fredrickson from the CTO Office for this Tech Talk to learn more about DevOps and how GSA can benefit from it.

Like most organizations, GSA IT is embracing the shared services model to optimize common IT functions to more efficiently meet GSA's mission of delivering best value in real estate, acquisition and technology services. This means re-evaluating the way GSA IT defines and creates IT solutions and investment strategies for the enterprise.

In 2016, GSA IT established Solutions Strategy Division within the Office of the CTO to partner with you to innovate, guide and architect IT solutions that fit your needs and support GSA IT's shared services model.

Please join Akanksha Sharma from the CTO Office in this Tech Talk to learn more about how Solutions Strategy is helping GSA move to a shared services model. Furthermore, she will explain how to engage with the division for assistance with your current and future projects.

Like most organizations, GSA is embracing Agile to more effectively respond to rapid market opportunities, and is investing in approaches that facilitate the delivery of business value and quality products to its internal and external customers.

So, is there a "right" way to becoming Agile? Should an organization care about "going" Agile or better business results?

Please join Lulit Tesfaye and Alicia Cyrus from the CTO Office in this Tech Talk. They will discuss what Agile behaviors look like at the Team, Program and Organization level; enabling a supporting environment and share resources from coaching pilot Agile teams across GSA organizations.