It is always sad to learn of another painful submission. May I repeat that you cannot expect much help from the "Help Desk" as they are only working from scripts provided to them by General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT). I have come to believe that GDIT does not really know how problematic the system is. Help Desk staff especially know little about specific Agency applications. Perhaps the questions were better directed to the USDA. Or here :) The listserv is the "Grants.gov SELF-help desk." I would like to add your case to my list of problems. The top two being fixing the Role on Project for one Key Person and printing all budget years. Those who watched the webcast yesterday heard that G.g knows about these but is ignoring them. Maybe GDIT cannot fix these. If this were my programming I would be ashamed to leave such problems in a system. Jennifer, I do no understand the actual problem you had. A bad error message is part of the problem, are there any good ones, besides wrong DUNS? More bad programming. Did you have more than 40 key persons, and could not enter them all. What was the actual error message. Why did you need to rebuild the application? Thanks for sharing this experience with the helpful information. I wonder if an S2S program would have avoided this? Bob ------------------------------ Robert Beattie UMich e-Business Point of Contact UMich Grants.gov Liaison Managing Senior Project Representative for Electronic Research Administration Division of Research Development and Administration University of Michigan xxxxxx@umich.edu (734) 936-1283 On Apr 16, 2009, at 11:10 AM, Jennifer Donais wrote: Dear All: My office had a lovely experience yesterday on a USDA Specialty Crop Research Initiative (SCRI) application. I wanted to share with you all because I think it might save someone out there time and aggravation. I sent the email below to the program officer to explain what happened. * * * Good Morning: We finally submitted this application successfully at 9:25 last evening after rebuilding the entire package from "scratch". The submission number is GRANTXXXXXXXX. We have the following three case numbers from the Grants.gov Help Desk (1-XXXXXXXX, 1-XXXXXXXX, & 1- XXXXXXXX). None of the three individuals we spoke to at the Help Desk could give us any guidance toward resolution, and in fact, we were disconnected twice & told once, "Due to the volume of calls, I'm have to hang up now." Finally, after poking around in the NIH G.g application instructions, I found the following paragraph: "After providing data for each individual Senior/Key Person, click the Next Person button at the bottom of the form to enter data for the next Senior/Key Person. Continue in this manner until data has been provided for up to 40 Senior/Key Persons. To ensure proper performance of this form, after adding 20 additional Senior/Key Persons please save your application, close the Adobe reader, and reopen it. For applications involving more than 40 Senior/Key Persons, the “Additional Senior/Key Person Profiles” fields will become available once data for the first 40 Senior/Key Persons has been provided." There was no mention of this in the USDA guidelines & the Help Desk folks, though they were told that we had 24 key personnel & that the error message indicated the problem was with the key personnel forms, did not mention it. It was purely by chance we were able to locate it. Anyway, our staff stayed 3.5 hours to rebuild the package - carefully following the above directions from the NIH guide - and were finally able to get it to pass error check and then submit. Obviously, my first concern is to ensure that Dr. D's proposal will be accepted by USDA, which I believe you indicated would be possible yesterday, since our first case number was obtained from the Help Desk prior to the 5 p.m. deadline. My second concern is to ask your advice on how best to share this story with the Grants.gov folks so that the word does indeed filter to the Help Desk folks. Again, we spoke to three different people on three separate occasions - in one case, we were on the line with the staff member for nearly 1 hour. But this "work around" never came up. I'm interested in ensuring none of our colleagues from other institutions have to struggle with this arcane system bug. * * * Honestly, I am beyond flabbergasted that NIH has identified (and codified!) this problem and a viable workaround, but no one at the G.g Help Desk seemed to know about it. This is likely too late to help anyone submitting an SCRI (due yesterday), but if it helps for other agencies' applications, then it's worth sharing. -- Jennifer Donais, CRA Associate Director Office of Grant & Contract Administration Research Administration Building 70 Butterfield Terrace University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA 01003 (413) 545-5888 FAX (413) 577-1595 http:://www.umass.edu/research/ogca Notice: This email (including attachments)is covered by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 18 U.S.C. §§ 2510-2521, is confidential and may be legally privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any retention dissemination, distribution, or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. Please reply to the sender that you have received the message in error, and then delete it. Thank you. ====================================================================== Instructions on how to use the RESADM-L Mailing List, including subscription information and a web-searchable archive, are available via our web site at http://www.hrinet.org (click on "Listserv Lists") ====================================================================== ====================================================================== Instructions on how to use the RESADM-L Mailing List, including subscription information and a web-searchable archive, are available via our web site at http://www.hrinet.org (click on "Listserv Lists") ======================================================================
