Vendor Support Center (VSC)
The Vendor Support Center plays an integral role in helping vendors solve issues that arise in the catalog management process. The focus of the system has been on delivering a best-in-class user experience for vendors who access it.
Goals and Objectives: For the Vendor Support Center, we have been closely following the guidelines from the FAS-IT Playbook which lays the cornerstone for system architecture and application design.
Our cloud solution will integrate with FAS enterprise services, both as a consumer and as a provider of information. We have been working with the FAS Cloud Services (FCS) and IT security teams to address infrastructure, tools, processes, as well as security requirements. The FCS ecosystem enables us to concentrate on developing and implementing the business requirements. The integration with FCS will provide alignment with GSA enterprise standards.
The key to an effective system is the quality of the user experience. We will enable continuous process improvement and provide a personalized customer experience; our users should have a predictable and best in class experience using https://vsc.gsa.gov
Overview: The eTools division developed vsc.gsa.gov application using FCS EBTA architecture. vsc.gsa.gov is a cloud-native solution that resides at the FAS Cloud Services' cloud platform and utilizes EBTA.
Conceptual Architecture
User interface: The UI layer is a separate codebase and is deployed as part of Apache-Drupal AMI EBTA stack in FCS. For the UI development, we are using Angular which is a modern language for high-performance UI components, it is accessible, and natively supports responsive design. The front end connects the natively deployed headless Drupal through the exposed json APIs for consuming the content. Angular uses Okta PKCE for authentication and authorization.
Headless Drupal: The API layer is exposed as json using headless Drupal architecture, It is deployed as part of Apache-Drupal AMI EBTA stack in FCS. Drupal connects to the MySQL RDS instance for the data store. The Drupal authentication is handled through secureAuth SSO.
