Government Track at Cloud Expo

The U.S. government's cloud site, Apps.gov, is scheduled for a re-design.

A story I saw says that the General Services Administration (GSA) isn't entirely satisfied with Apps.gov the way it's set up now, so some changes are in store for the site, including a soon-to-debut revamped request for quotations for infrastructure-as-a-service, a new informational section of the site, GSA-based social media hosting and a redesign of some of Apps.gov's user interface and content.

According to the GSA, the problem is that federal employees aren't buying much on the site - partly due to display problems. Instead, they're using it more as a place to get information. GSA's goal is to make Apps.gov a source for both procurement and information.

And apparently, the GSA's first Request for Quotations (RFQ), which was to have added Web hosting, storage, virtual machines and other Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) vendors to Apps.gov, didn't get the response the agency was hoping for. So, the GSA canceled it, scheduling a new one "extremely shortly," a GSA official was quoted in the article.

Also, there are changes scheduled for the social media portion of Apps.gov, too. Now, the social media portion of the site only provides agencies with consolidated terms of service for different social media sites. It also enables federal agencies to enroll in external services like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. This spring, however, the GSA will take on the role of service provider, hosting and providing blogging and other social media.

And, like any other successful change management strategy, better, more ongoing communication about Apps.gov is scheduled.

I'm glad to see the GSA is on top of making Apps.gov more relevant and powerful for its end users. Updating, refreshing, adding content is an important strategy to keep in mind for any cloud services provider - public or private.

We consider this an important priority for us, too, at Monitis, the leading provider of 100% Cloud-based network and systems monitoring solutions. Recently, we announced significant enhancements to our transaction-monitoring tool, enabling important new features and reports. We also made it more user friendly!