FBO Electronic Interface: Overview

FedBizOpps (FBO) has been designed as a single point of entry for Federal buyers to publish and for vendors to find posted Federal business opportunities across departments and agencies. This capability has been achieved by providing an easy data exchange interface between FBO and each buyer agency's electronic procurement system. Even though FBO accommodates buyer submissions using different Internet protocols (SMTP, FTP, HTTP) for communications, it employs a standard data exchange protocol, which was developed in accordance with FederalAcquisition Regulations (FAR) - see (http://www.acquisition.gov/comp/far/index.html), Subpart 5.2, Synopses of Proposed Contract Actions.

The data exchange protocol is based on a set of formatted, tagged document templates, each of which represents a specific type of acquisition transaction. As of FBO Release 3, Phase 2 (February 2004), which adds the NAICS code field, where appropriate, to existing templates and adds a new template for amending a Combined Synopsis/Solicitation, similar in format to the Modification template, FBO uses the following thirteen (13) templates:

• Presolicitation Notice - Synopsis
• Combined Synopsis/Solicitation
• Amendment to a Previous Combined Solicitation
• Modification to a Previous Presolicitation Notice
• Award Notice
• Sources Sought Notice
• Foreign Government Standard
• Special Notice
• Sale of Surplus Property
• Document Upload
• Document Deleting
• Document Archival
• Document Unarchival

As the FBO development team continues adding new features to the System, new templates will be added. Any changes and enhancements made to the interface in the future will be backward compatible and will not require any changes to the user's system, unless implementation of new functionality is desirable.

The goal of this document is to specify each template and demonstrate its usage through examples.

How to Post Notices and Solicitation Documents on FBO

In order to post documents to FBO using the email or FTP interface, a Federal buyer organization needs to follow the steps below:

1. Develop software that will generate emails or FTP files with records in proper FBO template format out of its procurement system. Systems, that previously submitted records to CBDNet, may be employed with or without minor modifications (FBO is backward compatible with CBDNet).
2. Contact FBO Administrator at help@fbo.gov for user authority (user-id and password)and for the e-mail address and URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of the FBO test server.
3. Send test messages for each type of template.
4. Validate results on FBO test server.
5. Notify FBO Administrator when test is complete and schedule a switch over to the FBO production system.