The Defense Acquisition University (DAU) has issued a status report on the migration of FAR search features from Hill Air Force Base’s FARSite to GSA’s Acquisition.gov site.
According to DAU, here is the latest summary of recent and planned activities to shut down the FARSite on Oct. 28, 2019:
- Oct. 1 – The General Services Administration (GSA) deployed the new Acquisition.gov site. The new site adds all agency FAR supplements. The added content and user load caused the site to become unresponsive, so the plan to redirect FARSite traffic to the GSA site was put on hold.
- Oct. 2-3 – GSA’s IT organization added computing resources to the Acquisition.gov site to better handle the increased traffic. The site proved to be responsive but still would not support the FARSite’s user base.
- Oct. 10-11 – GSA made plans to put the Acquisition.gov site under the management of Akamai Technologies, an Internet content publishing service, to better handle the increased traffic. (The Defense Information Systems Agency contracts with Akamai to host public DoD web sites. FARSite currently uses Akamai, and 83% of FARSite’s current traffic is handled by Akamai.)
- Oct. 17 – A go/no go decision will likely be made at the weekly FARSite transition meeting. (Representatives from GSA, DAU, and the Air Force’s offices of Acquisition, Materiel Command, and Life Cycle Management/Business Systems Sustainment attend these meetings.)
- Oct. 18 – With a go decision, Akamai will receive a request to redirect FARSite traffic to Acquisition.gov. Redirect rules will send users to the specific FAR part on the Acquisition.gov site which they were trying to access on FARSite.
- Oct. 21 – The redirect will prevent access to FARSite so that it may be turned off and decommissioned.
- Oct. 28 – Hill AFB is expected to turn off FARSite in support of an upcoming Command Cyber Readiness Inspection.
The Defense Pricing and Contracting office has advised against inserting DoD Class Deviation links within the relevant FAR sections at the Acquisition.gov site. An alternate plan to link to Class Deviations from the GSA site is being considered.
