Grants.gov's system-to-system (S2S) web services protocol is one of the most powerful and least used technologies available from the federal government. Unfortunately for Grants.gov, less than 10% of submissions are done via S2S. Something over 90% of submissions to Grants.gov are done via the downloadable forms in the PureEdge and Adobe formats.
Grants.gov themselves would like to see more subsmissions via S2S, presumably because they are cleaner, faster, and require less support. From the recent NCURA Magazine:
"Grants.gov encourages the use of a system-to-system (S2S) interface for organizations and institutions with a large volume of application submissions."
Why don't more organizations use S2S? For one thing, designing and building an effective proposal development and grant application submission tool is difficult work. Just because the S2S web services specification is public, does not mean it is easy. Software in general is difficult. But when you include the hundreds of forms, thousands of fields, the validations and rules of government grant applications, the cumulative environment is enormously complex.
It can take years to build an S2S system and it frequently mystifies us why anyone would even try. Especially when our solution, humbly speaking, delivers so much value at such a reasonable price point.
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