Vice President unveils new FirstGov site

Users of the federal Web portal can now find what they’re looking for in three clicks or less, said Mark Forman, OMB’s associate director for e-government and IT.The General Services Administration’s FirstGov team, Vice President Richard B. Cheney and the Office of Management and Budget relaunched Firstgov yesterday. Forman was the emcee of the event that showed off FirstGov’s newly organized front end.Information on the site is organized under one of the three categories that Forman also uses to classify the 24 OMB-sponsored e-gov initiatives.The initiatives and portals will eventually be under citizen-to-government, business-to-government, or government-to-government categories.GSA’s administrator, Stephen Perry, said the agency’s relationship with OMB is closer now than it has ever been because OMB will attach its e-gov initiatives and portals to the FirstGov site.The only technical changes to the portal were made in the reorganization of the front-end, but GSA also plans to develop a new search engine, essentially the site’s back-end, to bring faster access and more accurate searches. Users also will be able to download documents in Adobe Portable Document Format, said Deborah Diaz, GSA’s deputy associate administrator for FirstGov.