D--ATG Dynamo Software Support Services

The Department of Veterans Affairs, Corporate Franchise Data Center - Austin, 1615 Woodward Street, Austin, TX 78772 intends a sole source award to ATG for the VA Loan Guaranty Service (LGS) requirement of ATG technical support services for the current Veteran Information Portal (VIP) environment. VIP uses the ATG portal product as the core component of its information and web service delivery architecture. As VA expands the use of VIP, access to self-servicing benefits will increase and the current architecture must expand in an effective manner to support the delivery of benefits. Services are required in order to take advantage of the full functionality of the ATG product. Professional Services include the following: a. VIP has a business need to present dynamic web content to the end user base within each user community. This is currently done programmatically using a custom JSP page. A more flexible approach is required so that the content can be organized as small "Portlets" that can be presented to the user with minimal development effort. Even though ATG supports organization of web content as gears/portlets, often presentation of these portlets in a visually acceptable manner is not possible due to the varying sizes of the portlets. This is further complicated by the fact that a user can reorganize the content on the web pages using customization features. ATG provides some templates for organizing portlets on a web page, but these are not sufficient to cover all the permutations and combinations caused by varying sizes of the portlets. LGS needs to have a solution that provides a clean commercial website look and that can be maintained without sacrificing customized features. LGS needs assistance in identifying different best practice approaches. b. Business users require the ability to create and assign communities without any programmatic changes. Earlier versions of VIP supported the addition of new communities; it allowed creation of new "tabs", which could be assigned to the newly created community. This approach is no longer supported now since a tabbed structure conflicts with new top and side menus mandated under the VA's 6102 standards. In addition, all pages must comply with 508 standards. c. VIP is not using ATG's Adaptive Scenario Engine (ASE). " Technical issues exist that cause the Scenario Engine to not start cleanly in our environment. " LGS requires the capabilities provided by the Adaptive Scenario Engine; such as Alerts, Targeted Content, Targeted email messages, etc. d. Use of portlets that come with the product: " LGS requires assistance in the use of the Outlook gear, and the ability to provide single sign-on into the web based Outlook for all the Active Directory users. " LGS also requires assistance in the use of built-in Web Service based portlets to build service-oriented components. e. Resolution of ongoing issues " The contractor shall review product configuration and recommend changes for improved performance and scalability, review current LM, DRP, PES settings and recommend changes. In addition, the contractor shall review production logs and startup scripts. " The contractor shall resolve Scenario Manager errors, and profile update problems in the clustered environment. " The contractor shall make recommendations for the Web logic migration. f. The contractor shall provide on-call technical services support to assist VA with follow-up support to above tasks. Support can be provided by phone calls, e-mail, pc conferencing or on-site visit. Support will be requested via a designated POC both from VA and ATG. Authroity to award the sole source procurement can be found at 10 U.S.C. 2304(c)(1) or 41 U.S.C. 253(c)(1) or FAR 6.302-1 (a) (2) (ii) (A) Award to any other source would result in substantial duplication of cots to the Government that is not expected to be recovered through competition.The government would expect to duplicate the cost est. for the for this request if not provided by the software vendor. To the best of the Government's knowledge, ATG as the software vendor, has all the unique qualifications and access to proprietary code that would enable the government to release restrictions on the current implementation to allow full control of the software product. The Government would expect to duplicate the cost est. for this request if not provided by the software vendor. The Government would have to purchase the software code and develop the knowledge of altering it to perform the functionality required by these services. Because the software manufacturer will not release the code, the cost of purchasing is unable to be estimated. Responses to this notice must be in writing and must be received by 3:00pm est on February 12, 2008. Third part firms will be considered only if responding with clear and convincing evidence that the firm has been granted rights to provide the services being procured. The determination to open competition based on responses is solely with in the discretion of the Government. If a solicitation is issued, no additional synopsis will be published. Responses should be emailed to contact@example.gov.