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.acqnet.gov/far/),
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:
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:
- 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).
- Contact FBO Administrator at
fbo.support@gsa.gov for user authority (user-id
and password)and for the e-mail address and URL (Uniform
Resource Locator) of the FBO test server.
- Send test messages for each type of template.
- Validate results on FBO test server.
- Notify FBO Administrator when test is complete and
schedule a switch over to the FBO production system.
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