GSA Blog

Congratulations everyone – as of today,  GSA’s Acquisition Gateway is now 10,000 strong!  Thank you from all of us at the Federal Acquisition Service. We truly appreciate each person who has registered and helped the site grow so quickly. But we’re not resting on our laurels – in the coming weeks and months you can look forward to many more new and innovative features that will continue to help federal government buyers from all agencies act as one acquisition community and buy like a single enterprise.

The road to 10,000 started just three short years ago when we surveyed federal procurement professionals to discover how we might improve their acquisition efforts. What we found was that the need to for a single destination that had all the tools and resources required for a successful acquisition within a product or service category, like IT or professional services.

This discovery spawned the vision for a platform that would empower the acquisition workforce by providing access to common acquisition information, data, methodologies and tools – and in October 2014 – we launched the Acquisition Gateway.

The Acquisition Gateway launched rather modestly, with just three category “hallways” for IT hardware, IT software and administrative services. Now we have 19 hallways aligned with the 10 common federal government non-defense spend categories and the Acquisition Gateway has matured into a tool that assists acquisition professionals by giving them what they need to buy smarter and faster. Today, we are focused on superior navigation and procurement decision-support data and tools while governmentwide category teams curate unbiased, expert content for each of the hallways.

We continue to build the Acquisition Gateway using an agile methodology where users get to participate in its iterative development. Through usability testing and design workshops, they help to shape how it looks and what it does.

The more acquisition pros that join the Acquisition Gateway, the more powerful this collaboration tool – and the buying enterprise – become. It is not the sheer number of users that makes the Gateway so strong, but rather the contributions its users are making through sharing expertise, best-practice samples and templates, and in many cases the content and data that the growing community relies on for smart decision-making at each step of the acquisition lifecycle.

Big things planned ahead

There’s nothing like getting 10,000 people on board with us to give us the boost to keep going!

Our development team is constantly working to update the Acquisition Gateway, with new features deployed in “sprints” every two to three weeks.  Among the anticipated new features for the fall release are changes that:

• Expand the Statement of Work LIbrary to a full acquisition document library.
• Integrate an initial capability to build SOWs into the docLibrary.
• Beef up the Project Center – our “killer” app – with improved project tracking and the ability to share projects with other users.
• Launch a homepage redesign with more of a desktop look and feel.
• Tag all content for a better search experience.

Invite your colleagues
We’re celebrating our 10,000 users milestone by launching a new feature that lets you invite colleagues to join the Acquisition Gateway directly from the Community page. Once you’re logged in, it’s easy to send an invite: just enter an email address and personalize your message. And don’t worry about duplicates, our system will let you know if your colleague already has an Acquisition Gateway account. Go ahead … give it a try! Together, we can create a community to best support the federal acquisition workforce. And again, thanks to everyone who’s signed on to the Acquisition Gateway!  And on to 15,000!