Mac Work-around Solution for Federal Grant Applications on Grants.gov--On Wisconsin!

Grants.gov is the one-stop shop for applying for grants from many (soon to be all) federal agencies. The site is being developed under a $22 billion contract to Northrop-Grumman. An article in the The Washington Post points out that the software used to file electronic applications is a Windows-only proprietary client. The client software was developed under a sub-contract from Northrop-Grumman by a Canadian firm called PureEdge that has been bought by IBM. The software client is now called IBM Workplace Forms and a Mac version is due by November. Fortunately, there is a free work-around solution provided by the University of Wisconsin-Madison that does not involve Virtual PC.

According to Dave Schroeder of U. Wisconsin's Department of Information Technology,

The University of Wisconsin has released a standalone package for using Grants.gov on Mac OS X as a service to the community. The package uses Citrix client software and a special settings file to access the central Citrix server provided by Grants.gov, allowing users to access and use the PureEdge software via the remote Windows machine running Citrix server software. It is available for download from this Unversity of Wisconsin Web page.

The U. Wisconsin Web page has 11 easy-to-follow steps to use their software, Grants.gov for Mac OS X 1.0.1. The software is free but the U. Wisconsin does not provide support for it. Despite this terrific contribution, applicants using Macs still face some difficulties from the Grants.gov Web site. We tried to download an application package to serve as a trial exercise but continuously got time outs when using Safari. Firefox fared only slightly better--perhaps the Web site was under heavy load. We followed a number of links but never got to one that actually downloaded an agency's application package and gave up. We wonder why the federal government would have not specified a cross-platform solution[Bill Fox]