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GSA’s central procurement hub — SAM — will keep the ‘beta’ a little longer

Users will get a preview in April of the new SAM.gov — a central, one-stop website for all of the General Services Administration’s acquisition tools — but will have to wait a bit longer to access the full capabilities of the current SAM.gov.

Since 2017, GSA’s Integrated Award Environment has been operating two websites with the SAM moniker: the original SAM.gov, where companies and organizations register before vying for federal contracts and grants, and beta.SAM.gov, soon to be the central procurement website. Beta.SAM will ultimately consolidate 10 acquisition tools, and already includes Contract Opportunities — formerly Federal Business Opportunities, better known as FedBizOpps or FBO — and the reporting functions of the Federal Procurement Data System, or FPDS, which now reside on the Data Bank page.

The next major transition will be moving functionality from the current SAM.gov to beta.SAM, shuttering the former and dropping the “beta” from the latter.  GSA officials had planned to finalize the transition before the end of April but have since revised that timeline.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2021/02/gsas-central-procurement-hub-will-keep-beta-little-longer/171951/

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How and when GSA’s new central contracting portal will lose the ‘beta’

The next major transition to beta.SAM — the FPDS contract award data reporting tools — is coming next month, with the legacy SAM.gov next on deck.

Next month, the reporting function of a key federal contracting data tool will be retired as officials push users toward a new tool on a new site destined to become the central hub for all government contracting.

Moving the reporting functions of the Federal Procurement Data System — and other parts of the larger transition—has led to widespread frustration and confusion among contracting officers and vendors alike. The program office managing the transition is hoping to quell these issues for future roll-outs and through improved training sessions for users.

The General Services Administration is in the midst of an ambitious plan to consolidate every federal contracting tool—vendor registration, solicitations, contracts databases, past performance information, wage rates—on a single website.

The final site will be called SAM.gov — named for the System for Awards Management — but it won’t be the same as the current SAM.gov, where federal contractors go to register their companies before being allowed to bid on solicitations. The original SAM.gov is still live while the Integrated Award Environment, or IAE, team at GSA moves functionality for that and other tools to the beta.SAM.gov website.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2020/09/how-and-when-gsas-new-central-contracting-portal-will-lose-beta/168420/

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GSA extends procurement data reports transition due to coronavirus, feedback

The General Services Administration (GSA) won’t require anyone to use the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) reports function within beta.SAM.gov until the end of 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic.

FPDS.gov tracks all federal contracts of $10,000 or more, and its reporting module uses transactional data from procurements in ad hoc, standard and static reports.

The Integrated Award Environment office at GSA began moving its reports function to beta.SAM.gov on Feb. 1 but is now calling it a soft launch.

“We want to require the FPDS reports by the end of this year,” said Vicky Niblett, deputy assistant commissioner at IAE, during an ACT-IAC virtual session. “I will say we had wanted to do it sooner, but with COVID-19 and what we heard from our users, we are now targeting a little bit closer to the end of the year.”

IAE learned it needs to give the contracting community more lead time into transitions because there is a “large” learning curve using the new ad hoc report tool, MicroStrategy (not to be confused with the business intelligence company). The migration to beta.SAM.gov’s Data Bank was slated for completion on March 16, but for now, FPDS.gov users can continue creating reports there — though they won’t transfer.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.fedscoop.com/gsa-fpds-reports-transition-extended/

The Contracting Education Academy at Georgia Tech has established a webpage where all contract-related developments related to the coronavirus (COVID-19) are summarized.  Find the page at: https://contractingacademy.gatech.edu/coronavirus-information-for-contracting-officers-and-contractors/

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GSA taking bids for new contractor validation service

The General Services Administration has started the long-anticipated process to acquire new validation services for federal contractors and grantees.

The agency issued a request for proposals Friday (Aug. 31, 2018) seeking an identifier and unique numbering system for its Integrated Award Environment and System for Award Management to validate that companies or other organizations that do business with the government are who they say they are.

This comes ahead of the expiration this year of its current validation contract with Dun & Bradstreet.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.fedscoop.com/29638-2/

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