Most of the Four51 product development requests are customer driven, focused on operating better or selling more. I was asked recently if it was possible to use the application for purchasing by US government employees. I replied with a definitive “I don’t know.” After understanding the specifics of the question, the answer is “Yes,” and this is why:

For government employees to use online purchasing applications like Four51, they are required to be compliant with something called FIPS, which stands for the Federal Information Processing Standard. This standard requires a government employee’s browser to be configured to have non-FIPS-compliant cipher suites disabled. This means that those sites that are non FIPS compliant would not operate in the user’s browser. Because Four51 uses a FIPS compliant cipher suite called DES-CBC3-SHA, the user’s browser will work with the Four51 application.

There is a good article by Roger Grimes of Infoworld that you may want to read if you are interested in more information on the Federal Information Processing Standard. The article can be found at http://weblog.infoworld.com/securityadviser/archives/2008/02/is_your_web_sit.html

In the meantime, you can sleep easy, knowing that Four51 has it all taken care of.

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