Friday, January 16, 2009

Grants.gov Daily E-mail Notifications of New Opportunities

Grants.gov was scheduled to terminate the daily e-mail notifications of Agency new grant opportunities on January 31, 2009. During the January 15, 2009 GEB the decision was made to keep the daily e-mail notifications so this service will not be terminated. We will continue the RSS feed so applicants will have two sources to view new opportunities.

If you have any questions please contact the Grants.gov PMO staff.

Regards,
Grants.gov PMO

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

ALERT - Grants.gov Applicant Login Issue

If you are an applicant who has renewed, modified or registered with the Central Contractor Registration (CCR) after December 31, 2008 and cannot login to Grants.gov please contact the Grants.gov Contact Center (1-800-518-4726/support@grants.gov).

Grants.gov is currently experiencing an issue pulling the nightly data extract from CCR. If you have verified your CCR registration is active and you call the Grants.gov Contact Center please have the following information available so that Grants.gov can manually enter your information into the Grants.gov system to activate your Grants.gov username and password.

DUNS, DUNS plus 4, legal business name, government business primary POC email address, M-PIN, registration date with CCR, applicant name, phone number and email address.

Grants.gov will create a customer service ticket for your call and notify you once your Grants.gov username and password are active.

Regards,
Grants.gov

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

ALERT: Testing Environment Unavailable

The Grants.gov testing environment (AT07) is currently unavailable and off-line. We are working on bring it back up and will alert you when you can begin testing.

Regards,
Grants.gov PMO

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

CCR Registration

Are you having trouble getting to the CCR registration or update web pages? Do you need help registering?

Please refer to the CCR Handbook or Frequently Asked Questions.

If your questions/concerns are still unanswered, please contact:

CCR Assistance Center
888-227-2423
269-961-5757

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

ALERT: Grants.gov Testing Environment (AT07)

The Grants.gov Testing Environment (AT07) will be unavailable December 29 and 30. The Testing Environment will be unavailable in preparation for Build 2008 – 03 which is scheduled to occur January 10, 2009.

Regards,
Grants.gov PMO

Thursday, December 18, 2008

E-mail Notification Reduction Strategy

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January 8, 2009

UPDATE:

The Grants.gov PMO announced on September 4, 2008 its inclusion of an RSS feed on the Grants.gov website.

Its development and Inclusion of the RSS feed adds to the 255+ existing U.S. Government RSS feeds. The URL launch site for the U.S. Government feeds is: http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Reference_Shelf/Libraries/RSS_Library.shtml

The present feed sorts grant opportunities by Agency and Category. In January 2009 the RSS will evolve by adding two additional feeds: new opportunities and existing opportunities that have been modified.

In the coming months the Grants.gov RSS will undergo further evolution and increased usability.

At the present time the RSS feed supplements, it cannot replace, the Grants.gov email notifications system.
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On a nightly basis, Grants.gov transmits >650,000 emails updating potential applicants of grant opportunities and or modifications. The present burden consumes significant processing power on a system with finite capabilities. As a consequence, the applicant attempting to submit an application may find him/herself competing with the email burden for processing power.

Our strategy to alleviate the burden consists of 4 steps:
Implement and evolve a dynamic RSS feed that may, in some cases, obviate the need for email notification.
Because we know that many emails are sent to dead mailboxes, we will eventually require all present recipients to periodically re-enroll in the email notification system. This will clean up our present email listing inasmuch as non-existent email addresses will be culled from the list.
When re-enrolling, the term of the enrollment will be time limited (i.e., six months or annual). This will prevent the open-ended nature of the present system allowing for and institutionalizing a continuous self-scrubbing approach to business.
As the RSS feed matures, there will be a continuous campaign encouraging movement to RSS feeds vice emails.

The Grants.gov e-mail notification system may not entirely disappear to the degree the PMO desires, but any significant reduction will save monies during a time of limited funding. Moreover, as Grants.gov moves to a cloud computing environment, an arena based on transactional costs, the fewer e-mails sent the lower the costs for the grantor agencies.

Testing Environment (AT07)

The following testing environment (AT07) updates occurred December 12, 2008:

Upgraded to Weblogic 10.0
Upgraded to Adobe lifecycle 8.2 update 1
Upgraded to Java 1.5 Environment

Unfortunately, since these updates were installed we have been experiencing intermittent issues with AT07 being unavailable. We realize this is causing problems within the test environment. But at this time we do not know the root cause of the issue.

The above issue is, as of this date, priority 2 of 4 requiring resolution.

If you have any questions please contact the Grants.gov PMO staff.