Bob,

I'm sorry I didn't see your posting about the false credentials message.
That would certainly have saved me a lot of angst!  Thanks for your
thoughts on the situation.

Kathleen

Kathleen Foster
Director, Research Systems and Funding Information
Office of Sponsored Programs
Boston University

p: 617.353.4365
f: 617.353.6660

-----Original Message-----
From: Research Administration List [mailto:xxxxxx@hrinet.org] On
Behalf Of Bob Beattie
Sent: Wednesday, March 04, 2009 11:37 AM
To: xxxxxx@hrinet.org
Subject: Re: [RESADM-L] Trouble with Grants.gov

Let me add a few comments to this discussion.  We too are have problems,
but as I have said in the past, we can submit quite nicely until 11am.
27 so far today.  25 yesterday, but also in the afternoon so we got 40
in altogether.  Afternoon submission took 4-5 trys.

I thought I had written earlier, warning people to ignore that false
credentials message.  That is just part of the system user id overload.
There is no excuse for it, but it can be ignored.  I got it 2 or 3 times
yesterday,  once I ran out of the 3 allowed tries.  I just closed the
application and opened and tried again.  All of our AORs have the
same password -- an institutional password,  not a personal one.
Thus, I am not going to change anything for anyone.   I have come to
realize that the Help Desk does not really understand what is going on.
They do not submit applications, nor know how the
system works.   They are just contractors with scripts to resolve
simple problems.  We all on this listserv are much more knowledgeable
than any of them.

I suggest that there are no tricks or changes that will help us get
application into the system at this time.  Just open the file, save and
submit, and if you are lucky you will hit an opening.  If not, try
again.  I believe the Grants.gov staff are working with their
consultants from
General Dynamics Information Technology to improve the process.
Perhaps the GDIT folks did not realize what a pain using Adobe Forms
would be when they got the contract back in 2006.  Still, we expect
them to meet the demands.   A statement from them on why
they cannot would be nice, but better to just fix the thing.

It might be unfair to say that the big system fix in early February
"hasn't fixed the problem in any way. It seems worse than ever."  We are
not now getting all those pesky false errors such that we did not know
if the application got to the sponsor or not.  I have noticed an
improvement in submission speed, however, only before 11am :(  The error
checking process now seems to find real errors.  This morning we got a
rejection because there were 1000 participant/trainees listed in an R01
subaward budget.  That has been the only rejection in the past couple of
weeks, compared to the almost every submission prior to the big fix.

I like Kathleen's point in the last paragraph that some drastic
"thinking out of the box" is needed.  In the meantime, as we all focus
on the submission delays, we are not thinking about all the other issues
that need to resolved.  Wouldn't we like to print an entire application,
with all budget years, for example.
There are other such changes that we need, too.   Keep thinking about
what you want the system to do, besides be faster.

Luckily NIH has been very flexible in helping us deal with the
submission delays.  By their next deadline, there will be new forms, and
there must be improvements in capacity.

Bob
------------------------------
Robert Beattie
UMICH eBusiness Point of Contact
University of Michigan
xxxxxx@umich.edu   (734) 936-1283

On Mar 4, 2009, at 10:23 AM, Foster, Kathleen C wrote:

Winnie,

I agree with your impulse to want to find a way to manage a situation
that seems to be growing increasingly out of control with every large
deadline we come to. We began seeing serious Grants.gov system issues
three days before the deadline, which seems to indicate that the system
upgrade Grants.gov implemented February 7th and 8th hasn't fixed the
problem in any way. It seems worse than ever. I like your suggestions,
but I'm not sure we'll be able to convince the agencies to see things
from our point of view. NIH has been very accommodating, but other
agencies less so.

I want to relate a particularly frustrating and alarming experience I
had with the Grants.gov help desk yesterday afternoon. We have been
experiencing the full range of bizarre error messages and submission
problems that everyone else has seen (just business as usual, at this
point), but yesterday afternoon we saw a new one: failure to recognize
the username and password of our AOR. I called Grants.gov to determine
if this was just another symptom of system slowness or if something was
really wrong with our AOR's credentials. The help desk representative
ran a report and determined that the username and credentials were fine,
and suggested that I reset the password. I did so, and we still received
the error.

I called back once more, just in hope of determining whether there was
actually a problem with the password or not. The help desk
representative really could't say, and advised me to ask our e-biz point
of contact to delete our AOR's registration completely and have us
re-register her under a new user name and password. When I pointed out
that it seemed a bit unrealistic to take that action just two days
before the NIH deadline, knowing it can take up to a day to process a
registration, she indicated that it was my only option. I asked her once
again if that was really necessary -- was there an actual problem that
would be solved by taking this action? She would say only that they were
recommending this action to everyone who was experiencing this error.

I sat in my office for a few minutes, trying to make sense of the
recommendation. We have been submitting successfully to G.g almost daily
for two years. Since our initial registration, we've never done anything
to change the username and password of our AOR. Was something really
wrong with it? Could the re-registration be processed in time to allow
us to submit the many other applications in queue by Friday? Would this
just cause more problems that it solved? Did I really want to contact
our E-Biz POC and ask him to drop everything and deal with this? While I
was thinking this over, my colleague came to my office door and said,
triumphantly, that he had just been able to submit two applications.

So, there was absolutely nothing wrong with our AOR's credentials at
all. I was advised by Grants.gov to take a course of action that would
have been incredibly disruptive and problematic, and might have
jeopardized our ability to submit for the rest of the week, for
absolutely no reason.  Why would the help desk rep give me such bad
advice? Why wasn't she able to determine that the error message was just
a false message, and that the real problem was the same system overload
that we've encountered at every deadline?

I think what bothers me most of all is that there seems to be a failure
to acknowledge what is now obvious to all of us: the Grants.gov system
is not able to handle the thousands of applications that hit the system
in advance of a major NIH deadline. The help desk continues to advise us
to try one pointless thing after another, when in reality, the only
actual solution is to submit at a moment when there isn't a bottleneck.
Why not save us all the time and energy and figure out a way to stagger
submission windows by area of the country, for example, so each region
has a designated time to submit?
I'm sure there are many other solutions as well, but until the problem
is acknowledged, it can't be solved.

Kathleen Foster
Director, Research Systems and Funding Information Office of Sponsored
Programs Boston University

p: 617.353.4365
f: 617.353.6660

From: Research Administration List [mailto:xxxxxx@hrinet.org] On
Behalf Of Wilma Ennenga
Sent: Tuesday, March 03, 2009 7:05 PM
To: xxxxxx@hrinet.org
Subject: Re: [RESADM-L] Trouble with Grants.gov

I've followed the traffic over the past days and weeks (years!) as the
capacity issues a Grants.Gov have caused more and more of us to
fail to submit on the first, second, third, fourth, ad infinitum
attempts until finally the proverbial waters part and we're able to slip
through. Out here in the west, Grants.Gov has advised us to try to
submit after 7:00 p.m. and I suppose the west coast universities try
after 8:00 p.m. I've gotten the same error messages as listed by other
people, and found the same error messages disappear when the grants.gov
system clears out. Last night (yippee) I submitted two proposals between
8:30 and 10:30 p.m. with the second one going through finally about two
hours after the first, and the proposal numbering indicating that some
60 to 70 other proposals had been submitted in the interim. Since the
proposals were due at 4:30 Wasington time today, there was no way we
would have been successful this morning.

Because of the capacity issues at Grants.Gov, even if we (try to) submit
our proposal days prior to the deadline we are likely to be cross
deadlines with some other program and be unable to submit. THIS IS
INSANE AND WE CAN'T KEEP DOING THIS!!! The collective cost to our
universities is horrendous both in wasted time and in time not available
for other projects.

So, it seems to me we need to develop new rules institutionally and
within the community:

(1)    We will try no more than X (3?) number of times to submit one
proposal
(2)    Upon failure, if due to capacity issues at Grants.Gov, we will
write via e-mail to the Grants.Gov help desk and the Agency program
officer, explaining the problem and requesting an extension to submit
the proposal.
(3)    There will be a consensus among sponsors that exceptions will
be provided in all these cases so that our proposals may be submitted.
(4)    If granted, we will try again to submit within regular
business hours.  If we fail, fall back to (2) above.

Comments welcomed.

Winnie

P.S., I particularly appreciate that certain message from grants.gov
that I've exceeded the cap of three times that I can try to enter my
user name and password! Oh the irony!

Wilma G. (Winnie) Ennenga
Director, Office of Grant and Contract Services Northern Arizona
University Applied Research and Development Bldg. #56, Suite 240
1298 South Knoles Drive
Flagstaff, AZ 86011-4130

Telephone: 928/523-8319
Fax: 928/523-1075

P Please consider the environment before printing this email

From: Research Administration List [mailto:xxxxxx@hrinet.org] On
Behalf Of Lisa Williams
Sent: Tuesday, March 03, 2009 9:18 AM
To: xxxxxx@hrinet.org
Subject: Re: [RESADM-L] Trouble with Grants.gov

Hi -

I was having the same problem last night between 8:30 p.m.  and 10 p.m.
Mountain - G.gov wasn't recognizing user credentials.  I reset passwords
a couple of times, to no avail.  Finally, for no apparent reason, the
system accepted my user credentials and allowed to me log in.
Submission took less than a minute, and validation came within 5
minutes.  I did ask a colleague I called in a frustrated panic to
breakdance to generate some good luck and I managed to log in moments
afterward - though I'd like to believe that it was that simple to fix, I
think there was something else going on - either some nightly job or
update or whatever.  It would be nice to know, if that were the case,
the schedule of such things.  You can't submit anything during working
hours, and apparently if you hit the wrong window after hours you can't
submit then either.

Anyone know what the G.gov maintenance schedule is?

Lisa Williams, CRA
ph 208-426-1425
cell 530-867-6727

 >>> Balvinder Kumar <xxxxxx@CSUEASTBAY.EDU> 3/2/2009 9:21 PM
>>> I've been trying to submit an application to the NEH since this AM
and the latest is that grants.gov does not recognize us as a user in the
system.  Is anyone else experiencing this?  I was able to submit one of
our NEH applications last night.
Thanks for any help!
Balvinder Kumar
ORSP-California State University, East Bay

From: Research Administration List [mailto:xxxxxx@hrinet.org] On
Behalf Of schauerap
Sent: Monday, March 02, 2009 8:09 PM
To: xxxxxx@hrinet.org
Subject: Re: [RESADM-L] Trouble with Grants.gov

I too am able to submit almost immediately in the mornings before 11am
and then again, from home in the evenings after 7pm...but during the day
after 11am, nothing goes at all.  This has been the pattern for at least
the past month.  I am in Cincinnati, OH, eastern time zone.

I have also noticed that the few PureEdge packages I have had to submit
go through immediately, regardless of what time I submit.  It only seems
to be the Adobe packages that will not go.

On Mar 2, 2009, at 7:02 PM, Robert R Beattie 1 wrote:

We submitted 14 applications on Monday between 7am and 11am.  Then
nothing.
We are in the eastern time zone, far western side.   I note that
those who
are not having success are central zone or further west.

Have people in the eastern zone been able to submit in the morning?

If so there seems to be enough capacity to deal with just a partial
group of submitters, but as new zones come to work, there is
sluggishness.  We are not getting those pesky false errors now.  We are
just not getting connected.  Maybe people can report their inability to
connect on the Grants.gov blog.  There needs to be a systematic
accounting of the problem.

Regarding the JavaScript warning.  This is an Adobe generated message
telling users that they are using Javascript to make the submission.
Everyone one gets this message, it does not indicate a problem.
Don't turn
Javascript off.

I will get to work early to get all of ours submitted early so there
will be some band width for our western colleagues  :)

Bob

On Mon, 2 Mar 2009 15:23:58 -0800, Deborah Hofer <xxxxxx@SOU.EDU> wrote:
Yes!! I press save and submit, enter id and p/w. The box thinks a minute
and closes.

Question, at the bottom of the box it says Warning: JavaScript Window.
Do you know what that means?

Deborah d'Este Hofer MM
Grants & Sponsored Programs
Institutional Review Board Administrator Southern Oregon University 1250
Siskiyou Blvd Ashland, OR 97520 Churchill #205
541.552.8662
xxxxxx@sou.edu

"Sandra D. Garcia" <xxxxxx@TAMUK.EDU> 3/1/2009 2:48 PM >>> Is
anyone having trouble with G.g right now we cannot get it to submit our
proposals? And we are trying to get out three.

Thanks,
Sandra

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