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This blog is intended to share, cooperate with and learn from IT professionals serving the public sector. It is my intent that this blog may evolve to become a public sector industry forum for the exchange of technology advice, reviews, experiences, recommendations and best practices.

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 Government IT Glossary

Information Technology (IT) Glossary

Acronyms

GSA - General Services Administration

NIST - National Institute of Science and Technology

Glossary

ERP - (Enterprise Resource Planning software is an integrated information system that serves all departments within an enterprise. An ERP system can include software for manufacturing, distribution, warehousing, accounting, customer relationship management (CRM) and human resources. The major ERP vendors are SAP and Oracle. Lawson and Epicor are competitive in the midmarket and NetSuite and Aplicor are the most popular hosted or on-demand government ERP systems.

SATA - (Serial ATA) is a serial version of the ATA (IDE) interface, which has been the de facto standard hard disk interface for desktop PCs for more than two decades. The prior Parallel ATA (PATA) interface was created in 1986. SATA was introduced in 2002 delivering much higher speed and transferring data in each direction at 1.5 Gbps. In 2003, SATA II increased the speed to 3 Gbps. SATA provides a point-to-point channel between the motherboard and a drive rather than a master-slave architecture in the parallel technology. SATA uses smaller cables and connectors, which consist of four-wire shielded cable up to one meter in length (compared to the wide, flat, 18" PATA cables). While SATA defines only internal drives, eSATA (External SATA) permits drives to reside in their own housing outside the CPU and be plugged in as necessary. Providing an external, hot swappable drive solution similar to USB, SATA offers much higher speeds than the USB bus.

Web 2.0 - An umbrella term for a suite of social media tools and technologies. The term was originally coined by O'Reilly Media (www.oreilly.com) and CMP Media (www.cmp.com) in their 2004 conference on the named subject. Web 2.0 is not a specific technology; rather, it refers to two major paradigm shifts. The one most often cited is "user-generated content," which pertains more to individuals and consumers. The second, which is equally significant, but more related to business, is thin client computing. User-generated content comes in the forms of blogs, podcasts, wikis and social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook. With thin-client computing, data and applications are remotely stored on Web servers, often in mutli-tentant data centers, and a user has access from any computer via an Internet browser.