Software support services

Tender description

The University is seeking to procure a provider to supply PHP bespoke application support and development services, this support will be supplied remotely with the provision for onsite support / meetings, as and when required. Student and staff web based applications and services are within the scope of this contract, while maintenance and support of hardware hosting these services is out of scope. As part of the implementation of the new delivery model, and also to reduce the exposure to the risk of supporting critical systems with single points of failure, the University wishes to form a contract with an organisation that is capable of providing application support for PHP legacy systems. The University has a number of PHP applications, scripts and services, ranging in complexity and style, which have been developed over an extended period of time by different developers, of varying skill levels (see Appendix 1). This is an indicative list of applications and the University may remove or add to this list as required. Amongst the applications, many are required on a daily basis, eg Online Prospectus, while others become critical at key times throughout the academic year e.g. graduations. Several of these systems support business critical functions (see Appendix 1). As such, the University aims to ensure these applications are available and working over 99 % of the time, such as the: — online enrolment of students (approx. 3-4 000 students per day at peak enrolment time), — online prospectus (public-facing website and administrative backend), — online graduation ceremony ticket booking. Others are less public facing but still provide critical web services and support to other systems: — exam marks release scripts and web services, — online expenses (mileage and prior approval claims). On award of contract, any available relevant technical documentation will be provided to facilitate support and development. 4.2 PHP Supporting Technologies and Infrastructure: The more complex applications generally consist of a web browser user interface developed in Javascript (JQuery, Bootstrap etc.), HTML and CSS linking to an underlying database(s) (MySQL, Oracle and MS SQL) with appropriate business logic implemented in PHP. Recent applications have been built using the Zend Framework and follow the MVC pattern but many of the older applications are not as sophisticated. The applications are currently hosted on a clustered Zend Server platform but could equally run on a standard Apache setup. All source code is maintained in a Subversion (SVN) repository and Redmine has been used for issue tracking on the newer systems.