Grantopedia

Applicant S2S Growing as Grants.gov Transitions to Adobe

By Jen Flach

While many in the grants community are in a holding pattern as Grants.gov transitions from PureEdge to Adobe, system-to-system (S2S) implementations for submitting applications to Grants.gov continue to grow.  Around 300 applicant S2S organizations are now registered in the Grants.gov production system, an increase of about 200 since mid-December 2006.  Grants.gov estimates that an additional 50 have accounts in the Grants.gov test environment.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that nearly 18 percent of applications were submitted using S2S solutions for the July 5 submission deadline of NIH’s largest grant program. The comparable figure was 10 percent for the February 5 submission deadline. To date, more than 100 organizations have submitted applications to NIH using S2S solutions, NIH reports.

For those new to Grants.gov:  There are two main types of interfaces provided by Grants.gov for accepting applications from grant seekers.  Abode and Pure Edge are examples of just one type -- namely the person-to-system interface.  In this scenario, Grants.gov provides downloadable software for the end user to install and then use to prepare and transmit applications directly to Grants.gov. The second type of interface is system-to-system (S2S) in which Grants.gov provides a web services interface for automated submission. This option enables grantee organizations to use in-house or third-party software for grant application submission to Grants.gov.  It removes the applicants’ dependence on Grants.gov’s choice of forms software.  See http://www.grants.gov/applicant_s2s/applicant_system_to_system.jsp for background on the Grants.gov S2S program.

It is not surprising that Grants.gov and Adobe are still ironing out the timing and specifics involved of the PureEdge to Adobe transition.  This is a major undertaking and the devil is in the details, as is often the case with any large change in technology used in an enterprise system like Grants.gov.  This leaves many in the grantee community still asking questions like: What version of Adobe will applicants need to use?  How different is the look and feel of Adobe compared to PureEdge?  When will all the form sets be available in Adobe? When will agencies stop accepting PureEdge applications?

Unlike their counterparts who have been relying on Pure Edge, applicants using S2S solutions are not stressing over these uncertainties.  Grants.gov summed it up in the July 19, 2007, Grants.gov Stakeholder Webcast Questions/Comments (http://www.grants.gov/assets/WebcastQ&A071907.pdf):

“Question 39. What effect will the Adobe forms have on system to system submissions between applicants and grants.gov?

None, please refer to the applicant release notes for more information http://grants.gov/assets/ApplicantReleaseNotes070207.pdf.”

Applicant S2S developers may not be entirely immune to changes in the migration to the Grants.gov 2007 system.  For instance, some skepticism lingers as whether Grants.gov can replace the PureEdge “form within a form” functionality without a schema change or otherwise affecting the applicant S2S interface; however, Grants.gov and Adobe appear dedicated to tackling this problem despite the challenges.  In any case, the transition to Grants.gov 2007 will be relatively smoother and largely transparent to applicant S2S end users who will not need to adjust to new forms software.

One of the biggest benefits of Grants.gov’s person-to-system interface is it’s free; however, the investment in a system-to-system approach can justify the cost, by affording greater control over the grant applicant’s submission experience, especially for those submitting applications regularly to Grants.gov. 

Stay tuned for more blog postings on applicant and agency S2S topics…

Adobe Apologises in advance of Grants.gov release

We’re about 40 minutes into the Grants.gov Stakeholder meeting and one of my questions is being answered by Douglas Prevelidge from Adobe: if Adobe works with 7.0.9, what happens if you have succumbed to the persistent upgrade opportunities from Adobe. I know I have installed Adobe 8.1 and have a lot of trouble dealing with different versions of Adobe reader (and Professional). Doug looked really uncomfortable with a public apology. He said there have been “issues” in testing the new forms with the later versions. Here is the published apology that was unreadable in the broadcast but available in the PowerPoint on Grants.gov. This content does not need any embellishment.

The Grants.gov application, which is based on Adobe LiveCycle, was built and tested with Adobe Reader version 7.0.9 as the client software. Since then, Adobe has released new versions of both the Reader client and Acrobat; version 8.0 was released December 2006 and version 8.1 this past June. Adobe has determined that users of Grants.gov may experience possible issues if they have upgraded to the new versions of the client software.

We currently do not recommend the usage of Reader 8.0 and 8.1 with the Grants.gov application until more thorough testing has been conducted and these issues have been resolved. The Adobe engineering teams are aggressively working on a suitable resolution to this issue. In the meantime, we recommend that end users of the Grants.gov application either refrain from updating beyond Reader version 7.0.9 or re-install Reader version 7.0.9 if they have updated. Reader 7.0.9 can be downloaded from the following web site: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2_allversions.html and instructions for installation are included.  For those users that are experiencing problems with Acrobat 8.0 or 8.1 as the client software, they should contact Adobe customer support to receive instruction on how to install and use Reader 7.0.9 alongside their Acrobat software.

We are very sorry for any inconvenience this may cause users of the Grants.gov application and we are targeting a permanent resolution in the September/October timeframe.

More comments later, but this is the first interesting tidbit from the presentation.

Adobe update: time will tell

The delay of Adobe Day at Grants.gov signaled a larger delay in the deployment of the Adobe Acrobat Forms. This was confirmed during the May FDP, which I attended.

Conversations with a wide variety of sources and a hands-on drive of the Adobe NIH R01 form set indicates several problems. Certainly there were a lot of solvable bugs, which would be anticipated in a pre-alpha release. Others look difficult. The 3 major areas of concern (shared among us). I’ll handle each of these in turn.

Slowness: As it currently stands, Adobe is slow. In testing the application on a fast Macbook Pro and a fast PC with the Acrobat forms navigation window open, it took 55 seconds per form to move from the left window to the right window. Moving between forms takes some more time. Saving the proposal is fairly slow. The in-form calculation and movement within a form are acceptably fast. It is unclear what performance optimizations will be available to the development team given that Adobe is a well developed product at this point.

Form in Forms: Adobe Acrobat does support attaching other adobe PDF documents. Adobe does not allow data within a PDF form to pass through to the data in another PDF form it is attached to. This is a problem for Sub-contract budgets. It also could be an intractable problem.

Adobe is like PureEdge, sorta: While this may not seem like a big deal, there is general agreement that PureEdge is fairly pedestrian in its design (look/feel/interface). The Adobe interface was required by Grants.gov to look and behave (for the most part) exactly like PureEdge. There was an opportunity to make the interface better, but that has probably passed to the technology that will replace Adobe sometime in the future.

Adobe Day to come: Speculation at the FDP was that it would be a while before we would see a re-scheduled Adobe day. The Federal Agencies we talked to said, in essence, that Grants.gov couldn’t get the software to work so they killed the demonstration. Lord knows they have a very complicated system to build. Standby for further information from Grants.gov.