Thursday, April 9, 2009

Government technology to speed up private projects

Technology in 24
Originally posted on
Successful Thinkers Meetup by Josh Shackelford


Technology in 24
So I’m a 24 addict. If any of you are following this season or caught the episode from 11:00PM – 12:00AM, then you had a chance to see a pardon document produced and signed by the president in just minutes. For those of you that don’t follow the series, you are missing out and I’d like to explain to you what happened.

cisco-webex-lady-sitting Request a pardon
The FBI Director requested a pardon from the President, who then asked for him to draw up the documents and send them over to her when he was done. Of course he was already prepared. I imagine that the document was drawn up in MS Word, and converted to a PDF. I would also imagine that this would normally be a template, so this part isn’t impressive, but what happens next was pretty hot.

Remote desktop and file sharing
The director tells the President that he has the document and pulls it up to show her the document through a Cisco Webex. I would have opted with a different solution, one that was less expensive. But if you’ve got the funds behind you, Cisco’s Webex is a very reliable and robust application for sharing. It was pretty cool that they had 4 different people up on webcams for the conference, and had full control over their applications. You’ll also notice that they are using Logitech Webcams.

logitech-quickcam-delux From here the President was able to add her digital signature to the document by signing it through the webex session. She used a Wacom tablet to add her signature. It caught my attention since I had just blogged about the newest Wacom tablet. This is so awesome that they were able to quickly produce and sign an official document all remotely.

Send document to helicopter agent
While the document was still at the FBI, now with the Presidents digital signature, the FBI director needed to get the document out into the field so that his field agents wouldn’t restrain and arrest the person that was just granted immunity. He was able to send the document wirelessly to his agents while they were in transit in a helicopter.


What makes all of these even more amazing, is that all of this technology is publically available. You could even have all of your templates stored on Microsoft Live, or Google Docs for quick access from anywhere.

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Originally posted on Successful Thinkers Meetup by Josh Shackelford

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