Those who don’t know, there has been a change afoot. Our beloved (insert laughter here) FBO or Federal Business Opportunities is going the way of the dodo for a more modern feel. Enter beta.sam.gov. The intent is to consolidate multiple government websites and resources to one single interface. Sometimes change is good and necessary, other times it’s just for the sake of change. Judgement is still out on how this transition will be received.

FBO is and has been the kind of default posting site for all government effort. The majority of agencies are required, for transparency, to publish (aka post) their purchases and solicitations on a certain number of sites. FBO is typically one of those sites. You certainly will not find every opportunity there but it is a good place to check. If you build a profile you can also create recurring searches and have the results sent to your email.

All that said, beta.sam.gov is picking up that baton. This is a traditional website migration. both sites are active now but FBO is going away 1 November 2019.

The IAE Digest and GSA put out a report showing a pretty simple transition. Here’s one of the factors that will change they don’t talk about. Group logins go away. Previously your company may have used a group account to login and mark efforts you were interested in or following. Under beta.sam.gov you have to verify an individual. Yep, each time you login to beta.sam.gov you will get a text or phone call via login.gov that will give you give you a one time pass code. Role with this change. It may affect your business process but they are doing it to verify individual access and increase website security. A nuisance, sure. So is locking your front door. Welcome to the 21st century!!

Bottomline, in this case the migration of FBO to beta.sam.gov is an open story. We’ll see how it goes. There will be hiccups ad challenges to be sure, but provide your feedback to [email protected] and let’s work with it. A big ship takes a long time to turn…