Since its original launch in 2010, GSA Interact has served as a valuable and much needed platform for communication between GSA, federal government, and industry partners. This social media like platform helps contractors stay ahead with advanced notice on upcoming opportunities, on-ramps, solicitation refreshes, and events.
GSA Interact Redesigned & Relocated
Last month, GSA Interact was relaunched with a new look, similar to the look and feel of other recent GSA website redesigns, including the Vendor Support Center. In addition to redesigning Interact, GSA moved the website to a new URL. As of June 21, 2022, Interact is now part of the new beta website, buy.gsa.gov, and can be found at https://buy.gsa.gov/interact/. The website has some new features and now sports a clean design that is easy to navigate. We’ve put together a summary of all these changes for you below.
GSA Interact Website Changes
Sign In Process
The new Interact website now uses GSA FAS ID to sign in. This means your login information from the previous site will no longer work. However, if you use the same email address as your original Interact registration, your profile and group subscriptions will transfer over.
What has not changed, is that you do not need to register and sign in to view information, unless it’s within a group that is private.
Naming Conventions
On the old website, posts were categorized by Groups. While the actual groups remain the same, they are now officially referred to as “communities”.
Dashboard
When logged in on the old website, the dashboard displayed the latest posts from each group you were member of — all on one screen. Unfortunately, the dashboard hasn’t just changed, it’s been removed. If you follow multiple groups, this is the most disappointing and inconvenient change on the new website. Without the dashboard feature, you now need to click into each group to see the latest posts, similar to an unregistered user. We reached out to GSA’s support team and were told that the dashboard functionality was not a planned enhancement at the time.
You may be wondering if it’s worth registering on GSA Interact, if you can no longer view the most recent posts from each of your communities in one location. Thankfully, there is still a benefit to registering and signing in. When you sign in to the new website, the communities you subscribe to will be displayed in one section on the top of the page. This provides easy access to each community, as opposed to scrolling through the alphabetized list of 35 groups or using the filter to narrow down groups by category. When signed in, you’ll also continue to have the option to subscribe to groups to receive email updates.
Search Feature
In the redesigned website, GSA excluded another feature along with the dashboard. You may notice, the new Interact website does not include a search option. While the old GSA Interact website included a search bar, it seldom returned relevant results. Which is why we had high hopes for a functional search feature on the relaunch. Instead, Is there a workaround, use google to search site:buy.gsa.gov [your keyword]. For example, you could do a google search for “site:buy.gsa.gov oasis” to find posts on the OASIS + contract.
Other Essential Websites for GSA Contractors
GSA Interact is just one of fourteen websites we consider essential for companies that hold or are considering a GSA Contract. Learn more and view the full list here.
