SOURCES SOUGHT
D -- REQUEST FOR INFORMATION--NASA WEB SERVICES
- Notice Date
- 9/16/2008
- Notice Type
- Sources Sought
- NAICS
- 541519
— Other Computer Related Services
- Contracting Office
- NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA Headquarters Acquisition Branch, Code210.H, Greenbelt, MD 20771
- ZIP Code
- 20771
- Solicitation Number
- 09162008
- Response Due
- 9/29/2008
- Archive Date
- 9/16/2009
- Point of Contact
- David L Boon, Contract Specialist, Phone 301-286-6485, Fax 301-286-0356, - Sandra P. Bruce, Contract Specialist, Phone 301-286-3936, Fax 301-286-0357, />
- E-Mail Address
-
david.l.boon@nasa.gov, sandra.p.bruce@nasa.gov<br
- Small Business Set-Aside
- N/A
- Description
- THIS IS NOT A REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL, QUOTATION, OR INVITATION FOR BID NOTICE. THISIS A REQUEST FOR INFORMATION ONLY.NASA Headquarters, Office of Chief Information Officer is soliciting information aboutpotential sources for providing Web site services including, but not limited to: Content creation and management, Search, Caching, bandwidth and other means of accommodating very high traffic, Social media, and Application development. These services will support NASAs information technology (IT) and strategiccommunications teams.This procurement is in part a follow-on to NASAs existing Web services contract witheTouch Systems administered by NASA Headquarters. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)inquiries relating to the eTouch Systems Corporation contract shall be requested from: MsKellie Robinson; email: kellie.n.robinson@nasa.gov; phone: (202) 358-2265.The procurement is one of the four (4) acquisitions under NASAs IT InfrastructureIntegration Program (I3P), which will integrate business processes and information acrossorganizational lines efficiently and securely. The work will be performed at locationsyet to be determined and may include NASA facilities and offsite locations.Background:NASA operates several thousand Web sites, some public facing, some internal, and somewith mixed content. Many sites are designed to communicate with the general public,teachers and students. Other sites are intended to directly support NASAs mission orbusiness requirements. These sites are extremely diverse, in that they have a widevariety of audiences, information models, goals, and publication processes. Typically,they are run by small groups and projects, using project resources, and report to NASAsvarious mission directorates. The different requirements to create and maintain thesesites and services have led to a fragmented Web environment that is both award-winningand popular with the public, yet at the same time, inconsistent, inefficient andsometimes ineffective.Over the past five (5) years, NASA has undergone a consolidation of its Web environmentand integration of its general interest, public audience content. The NASA home page andthe home pages of NASAs Centers and Facilities around the country have been consolidatedin a single point of entry (www.nasa.gov), hosted in a common infrastructure, and employa standard editorial process. Other popular public outreach sites (e.g., give example ortwo) were also incorporated as part of this consolidation. NASA management is interested in extending the success of this consolidation to the restof its Web sites to the greatest extent practicable. In support of its primary Web sites, the external home page at www.nasa.gov and theinternal home page at insidenasa.nasa.gov, NASA manages several collateral services,including search engines, database and application development, video streaming, blogs,wikis and other social media tools and metrics and analysis. Other organizations withinNASA currently run their own versions of these services to various capacities.NASA is seeking input from potential offerors on approaches to unifying NASAs Webenvironment while providing a broad range of services to meet the diverse needs of NASAsWeb community. Responses should be no more than 20 pages in length. Each submission shall includeresponses to the questions listed in the following paragraphs.The response format is8.5" x 11", 12 pt, Times New Roman font. NASA is seeking capabilities from largebusinesses, as well as from small, small disadvantaged, small disadvantagedveteran-owned, and women-owned small businesses for the purposes of determining theappropriate level of competition. In addition to the 20-page submission, responses shall also include the following(limited to 3 pages or less, formatted as above): name and address of firm, size ofbusiness, average annual revenue for past 3 years and number of employees, ownership,whether business is large, small, small disadvantaged, 8(a), HUBZone, small smalldisadvantaged veteran-owned (SDVOSB), and/or woman-owned; number of years in business;affiliate information:parent company, joint venture partners, potential teamingpartners, prime contractor (if potential sub) or subcontractors (if potential prime); andpoint of contact position, address and phone number.Potential offerors are encouraged to address their approaches by answering the followingspecific questions, citing relevant examples where appropriate:1.How would a vendor approach content-management tools if several sites are updatedfrequently throughout the day by many editors in different locations, while others mightbe updated less than weekly by one or two people in one location? 2.How would a vendor approach security and other issues pertaining touser-generated content, such as public comments posted to nasa.gov pages?3.What would a vendors approach be to handling some sites that need 99.995 percentavailability and immediate incident response (such as the NASA home page) and other sitesfor which business-hour support would be sufficient?4.How would a vendor approach an enterprise-class, federated search capability thatwould give users access to millions of documents in widely distributed, differentlystructured collections?5.How would a vendor approach such a federated search capability for an Intranet,serving NASA employees and contractors, and including appropriate access restrictions?6.How would a vendor support multiple Web sites with very different informationmodels and different audience needs, i.e, example news magazine, event driven contentversus science data and research content?7.How would a vendor handle the bandwidth needed to serve NASAs Web content? Thecurrent baseline bandwidth is 600 mbps, which has been growing consistently at 5 percenta year and will need to grow more rapidly as more content is consolidated into thenasa.gov infrastructure. NASAs bandwidth usage also spikes during high-visibility events(historically, up to 52 gigabits per second; this is expected to increase with eachevent).8.How would a vendor approach handling a wide variety of Web content types, suchas HTML, XML, RSS, Flash, RealMedia, Windows Media and QuickTime, including multiple filesizes and resolutions for common graphics formats? 9.How would a vendor approach consolidating NASA Web sites into a new Webenvironment, considering NASA sites have been developed for users in a variety ofprogramming languages (ColdFusion, Java, Perl, PHP, etc), supported by backend Oracle andSQL databases, and incorporating different tools for content management and otherservices?10.How would a vendor approach developing requirements for and implementing newapplications within this new Web environment?11.How would a vendor approach integration with NASAs non-government partners? Forinstance, Yahoo provides live video streaming of NASA Television while Internet Archive,through nasaimages.org, provides a unified collection of NASA images. The goal would befor the vendor to work with Yahoo to manage their streams as part of NASAs unifiedprovision of live video streaming, and to integrate search results from nasaimages.orginto the results provided by NASAs in-house search capability.12.How would a vendor approach issues such as load-balancing, caching, hosting,security and availability if the ultimate responsibilities for those services reside inanother contract?13.How would a vendor approach consolidating public outreach, science, technical,and business content in a common Web architecture that satisfies the needs of diverseaudiences and content owners?14.How would a vendor address change management for such an effort? Consider thatprevious consolidation efforts were successful for Web sites under a single line ofbusiness (Strategic Communications), and further integration would cross NASAs lines ofbusiness.15.What would a vendors approach be to providing social media applications foremployees and contractors on NASAs Intranet?16.How would the vendor market their site and tools to customers within NASA?17.How would the vendor approach ensuring that new web technology and services areincorporated into NASAs web infrastructure?18.How would a vendor view and manage the web services lifecycle, including contentretirement, design refreshment and technology infusion/obsolescence? 19.How would a vendor approach transition from the existing infrastructure andcontract into the new contract and environment?20.Potential offerors are specifically requested to comment on appropriate contracttype(s) and length, the value and general approach to chargeback models, and anyopportunities for the Government and offerors to share in savings during the contractadministration phase. The Government will use the information provided as recommended inputs that will lead theGovernment to develop a comprehensive procurement strategy and to develop a resultingsolicitation.Any information used will be on a non-attribution basis. Restrictionsthat would limit the Governments ability to use the information for these purposes areof limited value to the Government and are discouraged.This RFI is for information and planning purposes and is not to be construed as acommitment by the Government nor will the Government pay for information solicited.Respondents will not receive feedback on the information obtained through this RFIprocess.All responses shall be submitted to David Boon by NLT close of business, September 29,2008, via email: david.l.boon@nasa.gov.
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