Inactive

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), Economic Research Service (ERS), Information Services Division (ISD), intents to negotiate a sole source contract with Gordon Flesch Company. USDA’s... The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), Economic Research Service (ERS), Information Services Division (ISD), intents to negotiate a sole source contract with Gordon Flesch Company. USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) acquired Laserfiche Rio enterprise document management system (DMS). The solution is critical to enabling the successful completion of the agency’s website upgrade, which had been selected as a Secretary of Agriculture’s Signature Process Improvement Initiative to improve web services for users, the underlying IT foundation to better support current and evolving needs, and internal processes to develop and disseminate products. Thus, this continues as a critical component of USDA’s IT Modernization efforts and improving the customer experience. ERS adopted the Laserfiche DMS to store and manage files outside of the Umbraco web content management system (CMS) in order to improve the website performance. ERS performed market research, a cross-agency team evaluated various products, and selected Laserfiche as the best solution based on many factors. The ERS team has been working closely with the contractors to configure the Laserfiche DMS for our needs and integrate it with the Umbraco web content management system for the Laserfiche document management system and integration. In doing so, there has been a considerable amount of work to create tailored document repositories for our various product suites (notably Publications, including Outlooks; Charts, including Charts of Note; and Data file collections), tailored templates for each of the product suites, and custom workflows. Thus, the system is uniquely positioned to provide the necessary functions ERS requires to fulfill its mission of disseminating economic research to the public. We have no plans to find, acquire, configure, and deploy “replacement” software at this crucial time. Without it, the website upgrade will not be fully functional at delivery and readily useful for further professional development. In fact, without Laserfiche, the entire website is at risk. Gordon Flesch Inc is the sole distributor of USDA’s instance of Laserfiche, thus additional licenses and renewals can only be purchased through them. Gordon Flesch products are proprietary and are only available from Gordon Flesch does not have authorized resellers of this product. Gordon Flesch is the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) for the software and owns the copyrighted license source software with all legal rights, privileges, and ownership contained therein. No other source or competitor may legally modify or change the software, nor would they have access to the course code to do so. The NAICS Code for this requirement is 541519 – Other Computer Related Services THIS NOTICE OF INTENT IS NOT A REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS. Authority for this sole source procurement is under 41 U.S.C. 3304(a)(1) as implemented in FAR 6.302-1(a)(2), one responsible source and no other supplies or services will satisfy agency requirements. This notice is not a request for competitive quotations. No solicitation document is available and telephone requests will not be honored. Any firm that believes it can provide the services listed above may submit substantiating documentation in writing to the identified point of contact. Information received will be considered solely for the purpose of determining whether to conduct a competitive procurement. Oral communications are not acceptable in response to this notice. A determination not to compete this proposed contract based on responses to this notice is solely at the discretion of the Government. The Point of Contact for this action is Ms. Marian Dyson and any response must be emailed to Marian.Dyson@usda.gov. Verbal responses are not acceptable and will not be considered.