Integrated Award Environment (IAE) Industry Community

As we’ve mentioned previously, building the new beta.SAM.gov is an iterative process; we’re constantly making improvements, sometimes behind the scenes and sometimes to more public-facing features, using agile development. Your input is valuable in the process.  Please continue to use the feedback tool found on every page of beta.SAM.gov to let us know what’s working well and how we can improve the system for you.

As a perfect example, we just made some updates at beta.SAM.gov that you should know about.

In the contract opportunities section (or domain), we added time zones to search results and result downloads. Now, you can be sure exactly when responses are due from the results page without having to go into the notice detail page.

For those who use the contract opportunities public search API, we updated the v2 endpoint to https://api.sam.gov/opportunities/v2/search. This also is updated in the open.gsa.gov documentation.

If you’ve used an API in the past, but you no longer need to, you can now remove the API key from your profile page. Doing so will stop email reminders about needing to refresh the key. You can get a new public API key if you need one at a later time.

We also fixed an issue some users were having that caused them to continue to receive email updates on unfollowed items. 

To avoid confusion between FPDS.gov and beta.SAM.gov, we have kept contract data searches (to view individual contracts) only at FPDS.gov. This means that contract data is no longer available from the search dropdown menu at beta.SAM.gov. Any saved searches for contract data will be unavailable, and any saved searches of “All Award Data” will not return contract data results.

The above change has no effect on contract data reports (which aggregate data across contracts) at beta.SAM.gov. Those remain available in the Data Bank and will become authoritative on October 17, 2020. 

We’ve made some enhancements to contract data reports at beta.SAM.gov ahead of the transition. Please note that you may need to clear your browser cache to see all of these changes. 

• The standard Contractor Search report now suggests names in a dropdown as you begin to type the contractor name. This helps you find the correct vendor more easily.
• In all standard and administrative reports, you can now select up to 20 federal organizations instead of only 10, meaning you can run more efficient reports.
• You can now drill to Product Service Code (PSC) and PSC Description (PSC DESCR) separately on standard reports such as the Recycled Content Product Purchasing Data report and Sustainability report.
• We upgraded the reports software to the latest version to improve security and resolve some browser issues with Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer 11.

We updated the user reference guides for contract data reports to reflect the above changes, and to provide a workaround for formatting issues when exporting to Excel. We also added a user reference guide for federal assistance listings reports. 

Finally, we added the option for you to be notified when we post release notes (detailed information about regularly scheduled updates we make to the system). If you’re logged in to beta.SAM.gov on the release notes page, you’ll see a button allowing you to turn on notifications. If you do, you’ll get an email every time we post new release notes.