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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. In addition to the ability to interact directly with the FBO system via its web interface, FBO provides 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 the Federal Acquisition 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 Version 4.6 (July 2010), which added a new template for the Intent to Bundle Requirements (DoD Funded) notice type as captured in the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS) at subpart 205.205-70, FBO supports the following fifteen (15) templates:

The goal of this section is to identify each template and demonstrate its usage through examples. As the FBO development team adds new features to the System in accordance with the configuration management process, 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.

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 your 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 your Agency Administrator or the Federal Service Desk (www.fsd.gov) to request 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 the FBO test server.
  5. Notify your Agency Administrator when test is complete and schedule a switch over to the FBO production system.