SOURCES SOUGHT
70 -- The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AO) is currently performing a market survey to identify vendors that can meet the requirements for a unified federated/enterprise search solution to inclu
- Notice Date
- 6/13/2007
- Notice Type
- Sources Sought
- NAICS
- 519190
— All Other Information Services
- Contracting Office
- Administrative Office of the U. S. Courts, AO-Office of Internal Services, Procurement Management Division, One Columbus Circle, NE, Suite 3-250, Washington, DC, 20544, UNITED STATES
- ZIP Code
- 00000
- Solicitation Number
- RFI-07-OIT-002
- Response Due
- 6/28/2007
- Archive Date
- 7/13/2007
- Description
- This Request for Information is for the purpose of conducting market research. This RFI does not constitute a future contract and vendors shall not be compensated for providing information. There is no solicitation available at this time. 1.0 Purpose The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AO) is currently performing a market survey to identify vendors that can meet the requirements for a unified federated/enterprise search solution to include associate software and support services sources capable of providing Commercial Off-the-shelf (COTS) software products and supporting services described herein. 2.0 Background The Judiciary is in the process of deploying a federated portal service which is built on JSR-168 and JSR-286 (Draft) standards and runs on a private network. The private network contains over 400 autonomous web sites and enterprise applications, many of which have a native search solution. The technology used to support the federated portal deployment is IBM Websphere Portal version 6.x on a Red Hat AS version 4.x Linux operating system with an IBM Tivoli Directory Service configured to LDAP version 3 standards. This directory service is used to support federated user authentication and data access authorization requirements. The federated portal will provide federated search services to both java-based and Microsoft SharePoint 2007 niche portals registered in the federated community. The short term vision for the portal's search service is to provide both a federated search experience for the entire federated portal community as well as be deployable into an application for indexed search support. The long term vision extends federated search support to internal court websites lacking an internal portal infrastructure. It should be noted that the Judiciary does not manage classified materials, however the Judiciary does manage sensitive information which requires special handling to comply with user accessibility and information privacy parameters. 3.0 General Description: A unified federated/enterprise search solution which includes software and support services. The requirement is for a search capability that can look for information among many systems based upon a single user query. The results of this query should support ranking based upon relevancy criteria, support follow-on query within a search results return, use two or more methods to identify the information source. The solution needs to provide a scalable, phased approach for managing content additions, use an automated method for the identification of data to the search mechanism, provide a quick method for deleting content that should not have been included in a search. The search solution also needs to identify duplicate content, include an option to decentralize content administration, and support user group information access authorization constraints if applicable. The solution sought includes services to implement and manage the search service. The managed responsibilities include a daily process for reviewing logs and updating the relevancy rules daily based upon user history. System administration will need to support continuous availability as long as a user has access to the enterprise portal. The search infrastructure is designed to support scheduled maintenance on hardware in a manner that does not disrupt availability of search service through portal to the end user. 3.1 High Level Requirements a) The solution must be provided, managed and be maintained by one service provider which has experience in the operational and maintenance aspects of indexed search, federated search, and post-search processes. b) The search software must be capable of providing structured and unstructured information clustering c) The unified federated/enterprise search solution shall include provisioning for platform services to include project management, installation, configuration, training, operations, maintenance, disaster recovery, help desk, and daily updates to relevance algorithms based upon daily reviews of the search system?s automated collection of usability metrics. d) The search solution shall be (simultaneously) deployable, as a federated search solution as well as an indexed search solution. e) The search solution shall provide at least three search query methods of which one method must be role-based search query. f) The search software application shall be designed for use on 64-bit servers using the Red Hat Linux version 4.0 or higher operating system. 3.2 Specific Requirements: g) The search solution sought will be COTS software that provides for information search/s in both an indexed (single application) and federated (enterprise) environment to include the automatic clustering of information content. h) Shall provide the capable for indexing enterprise content in an ?as is? condition without any prerequisites for a content taxonomy. i) Shall integrate content in a manner that performs simultaneous searches throughout diverse sources such as internal documents, various intranet sites, selected syndicated news feeds and selected internet sites. i) Shall support two-factor authentication without any additional middleware. j) Shall be compatible with IBM Tivoli Directory Services, LDAP, eDirectory and Active Directory. k) Shall be compatible with Lotus Notes version 6.5 or higher. l) Shall be delivered with out-of-the-box API connectors for the following databases: Informix, Oracle, DB2, MySQL, Microsoft SharePoint portals, Microsoft SQL, and EMC Documentum. m) Shall provide a single query return to the end user that automatically combines indexed and federated results to include the organization?s licensed content from external information providers such as Lexis-Nexis. n) Shall provide a graphical user interface to support remote web-based system administration, specialized functionality development to modify the COTS product, and to support change management. o) Shall support various relationships to include one-to-many, many-to-one and many-to-many between result documents and the original document source. p) Shall be capable of providing search of text for a query specified word or group of words that are in the file formats listed in the following sentence. It shall provide and deliver a query results that opens up in the file at the exact instance of the occurrence of the word or group of words the search query was looking for within: MS Word, MS EXCEL, MS PowerPoint, Corel WordPerfect, Adobe Acrobat PDF and Adobe Acrobat PDF-A. q) Shall include functionality that displays a separate result for each word or word grouping, when a document contains many instances of a word or word grouping when displaying the results of a search query. r) Shall provide a customizable alert notification which can be set by an end user. This notification process shall be designed to make the end user aware of additional content added to the information environment that is related to a previous search query submitted by the end user. 3.3 Required Search Query Result/s: s) Shall be organized and presented to the end user by categories derived from words and phrases. t) Shall be in a structured grouping (cluster) when there are more than five (5) results returned and in an unstructured grouping (cluster) when there are five (5) or fewer results returned. u) Retrievals by the search engine must contain only documents that the user is authorized to view. Unauthorized results shall not be retrieved and then hidden. v) Search system query processing must index and secure information content at the sub-document level and at the field level for both federated and indexed results. w) Search query function results relevancy ranking process includes algorithms for freshness, term proximity, and link analysis. x) Search query function uses formula-based sorting for retrieval of a specific result. y) Search query function returns all data including the clustering tree and search results as an XML feed. z) Functionality shall be capable of combining several URLs in supporting a common thought into a single result, without any special pre-document processing. aa) Functionality shall provide the user the capability to save and export the results as plain text, HTML, and RIS citations depending upon the end user?s preference. 4.0 Submittal of Information It is requested that contractors submit the following information: ? High level information about company, including years in business, number of users on existing system, etc. Links to a website or marketing materials are acceptable as long as the information is easy to discern from the materials. ? General description of how your system meets the high level requirements detailed in this RFI. ? All required server operating system, database, application components and licensing, (and workstation components and requirements) should be clearly defined and explained. ? Any optional components and licensing should also be clearly defined and explained. ? A high level pricing guide (including customization costs, licensing, professional services, post implementation support and maintenance, etc.) should be provided with any response to the RFI. ? Identify any applicable GSA Schedules 4.1 Time/Date of Submittal Information submitted in response to this Request for Information should be submitted electronically no later than 28 June, 2007. Non-electronic submittals will also be accepted. Information should be submitted to: e-mail address: thirston_phillips@ao.uscourts.gov Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts Attn: Thirston S. Phillips One Columbus Circle, NE Washington, D.C. 20544 4.2 Anticipated Plan of Action The government intends to evaluate the potential sources against how well their submittals meet the requirements stated in this RFI. The top ten potential sources will be extended and invitation to demonstrate their product to the AOUSC. After the demonstrations have been presented, a formal request for proposal will be issued to the top five potential sources that are considered to be technically acceptable. 5.0 Questions Questions regarding this Request for Information will be accepted in writing ONLY. No telephonic questions will be accepted. Questions should be addressed to the same address listed in 4.1 above.
- Place of Performance
- Address: One Columbus Circle, NE, Washington, D.C.
- Zip Code: 20544
- Country: UNITED STATES
- Zip Code: 20544
- Record
- SN01317190-W 20070615/070613220102 (fbodaily.com)
- Source
-
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