Unified Search Draft Solicitation Notice

4/18/2023 Update: The due date for responses has been extended to 04/26/2023 at 3pm ET. ***This is a pre-solicitation notice/request for information and not an actual solicitation. *** The Administrative Office of the United States Courts (AO) has a requirement for agile development of a unified search capability to interact with various judiciary systems. The purpose of this requirement is to develop and implement a Minimum viable product (MVP) replacement for the current Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) public search experience in support of the Department of Program Services (DPS) - Case Management Systems Office (CMSO) through the evaluation of Proof-of-Concepts (PoC). This unified search initiative will focus on developing a modern search capability for the documents and case information that are in the Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) system of each federal court in the judiciary. The Unified Search effort will be limited to replacing the search feature that allows the public to search for case details/documents that are publicly available via the PACER portal. This effort will involve making these documents accessible through a custom developed, cloud-based search interface on a cloud architecture. This pre-solicitation notice is being provided in advance of the solicitation to provide vendors time to review the requirements and provide an opportunity to ask questions and provide feedback on the current requirements and evaluation criteria. We have also provided a few questions below that your organization may answer if submitting a response to this pre-solicitation notice. Your organization is not required to respond. Your organization may still submit a response to a solicitation even if you do not respond to this pre-solicitation notice. Questions and responses to the questions below need to be submitted to the Contracting Officer, Andrew Bunk (Email: contact@example.gov), by no later than 3:00pm ET on April 26, 2023. Emails should reference "USCA23I0011 Unified Search" in the subject line of the email. Questions and responses submitted after the deadline may not be considered. Responses and questions may be submitted in the body of the email, an attached word document, or spreadsheet. If submitting questions, please make sure to note the attachment and page number that each question is referencing. If your question is more general and does not cite to a specific attachment or page, then just put N/A or something similar. The citations will help us to better understand and answer your questions. We may not release a question-and-answer sheet after the deadline as we may provide answers through changes and revisions to the attached documents, if a solicitation is released. Attached are the draft requirements documents along with the draft evaluation criteria: 1. A Statement of Objectives (SOO) 2. Attachment A - Unified Search Requirements-03-09-2023 3. Attachment B - Draft Proof of Concept PoC Evaluation Checklist 4. Attachment C - AOUSC Baseline Inventory Tools 5. Attachment D - Cloud Services Template Draft 6. Instructions to Offerors and Evaluation Criteria - Unified Search Questions to Consider if Responding: (You do not need to answer all these questions. Answers to these questions though will help inform potential changes to the requirements and in planning reasonable timeframes around a solicitation.) 1. Is your organization interested in this requirement and are you likely to submit a response if and when a solicitation is released? 2. Are there any areas in the documents that are unclear or that you feel you need additional information to be able to respond to the solicitation? If so, please identify the specific attachment along with the page number (tab in the workbook) or citation in the document and explain what is unclear or what additional information is needed. 3. Is there any additional information in Attachment D that is needed for you to be able to show the cloud services needed for your solution? Keep in mind pricing will be in a separate volume/attachment with the solicitation. The AO intends to utilize our own Cloud environments to host the solution as noted in the SOO. The Cloud environments available at the AO for use likely will be posted with the solicitation. 4. What do you believe is a reasonable amount of time for your organization to develop your proposal to both Stage 1 and Stage 2 of the evaluation process? Keep in mind the materials currently being requested from vendors at each stage, see Attachment 6 (as noted above). We are interested in understanding how many weeks it may take vendors to prepare their proposals for each stage (Ex: 2 weeks for Stage 1, 4 weeks for Stage 2). If your organization can identify the aspects of the required proposal information in each stage that would be most time consuming, that would be helpful for our understanding and planning. 5. Is there any evaluation criteria you think we should include that is not currently included? If so, please describe the criteria and explain why it should be included. (See the Draft Evaluation Criteria) 6. Is there any evaluation criteria currently included that you think should not be considered? If so, please identify the criteria and explain why it should not be included. (See the Draft Evaluation Criteria) 7. Considering that the purpose of Stage 1 is to allow potential offerors to quickly respond with little proposal development cost, is any of the information requested in Stage 1 difficult or onerous to provide? If so, please identify the element(s) of Stage 1 that you believe is problematic and explain the reasons why. 8. Are there any additional items that should be considered for pricing as part of this requirement that are not already mentioned in the various attachments? Keeping in mind the pricing sheet is not attached, but would likely be provided at the time of solicitation. 9. Please feel free to provide any additional feedback you have. Responses should include: Business name and address; Name of company representative, their business title, and contact information; UEI; Your contract vehicles that would be available to the Government for the procurement of the product and/or service, to include General Service Administration (GSA) Government-Wide Acquisition Contracts (GWAC): ALLIANT 2, VETS II, STARS III; the GSA Federal Supply Schedules (FSS), or any other Government Agency contract vehicle that allows for decentralized ordering for all federal agencies. Do not include any general marketing material. The Judiciary is not interested in general marketing information. The AO intends to solicit and award a task order under the GSA Alliant 2 Governmentwide Acquisition Contract (GWAC), but the acquisition strategy may change. General Information Procurement within the federal judiciary is not subject to the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), which applies to most Executive Branch agencies. Judiciary procurement policies are the responsibility of the Procurement Management Division (PMD) within the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AO), and are issued in the Guide to Judiciary Policy, Volume 14 (Procurement). Offerors or contractors wishing to find the full text of individual provisions or clauses incorporated by reference in judiciary solicitations and contracts are directed to Appendix 1B of Volume 14. The POC detailed at the URL below is not the POC for this notice, and should not be contracted regarding this notice. URL: http://www.uscourts.gov/procurement.aspx The AO will not reimburse any entity for any costs or potential costs they may incur in responding to this notice. Responding to this notice is purely voluntary.