Software package and information systems

Tender description

The Houses of Parliament have published this Prior Information Notice (“PIN”) to try and identify potentially interested organisations with relevant expertise and experience to provide a Publishing system that will integrate with existing applications and software used in producing the Hansard documents every day. The system will support the no-fail publishing of business-critical documents for the House of Lords and the House of Commons on the Parliamentary website and as printed publications. The Houses of Parliament wish to give notice of a potential contract opportunity for a Publishing System used to publish Hansard documents daily for the House of Lords and House of Commons, as web and printed publications. 1 possible solution will be a system to provide the following: The objective of this project is to identify an external supplier to develop, supply, maintain and support a publishing system to be used by an internal publishing team. The publishing system must utilise XML technologies. This system must be capable of handling large quantities of data, and be highly robust: publishing activity takes place between 7:00 pm to 5:00 am on each date that Parliament sits. Hansard publications can range from 4-1 500 pages in length. Most content is text based though it can include non-text formats. The system must enable the content to be grouped and published according to current “structures” — Parliamentary sessions, Bound Volumes, Daily parts and their associated index publications. It must have the ability for the publishing team to be able to adjust these structures and create new ones as required. The system must enable the content to be outputted as PDF and XML. It must enable the content to be formatted according to current and future page layout styles. The system must enable the content to be published on our website in XHTML. The system must be able to utilise XML files supplied from the Hansard Reporting System to allow the preparation of styled Hansard Publications as PDF and structured XML — which are used to publish Hansard on the Parliamentary Website. This system must be powerful and efficient enough to handle business-critical productivity. 24/7 system support is required: publishing takes place in an incredibly time-critical environment so the supplier must be able to provide rapid, pragmatic and functional support. Another possible solution will be to procure a contract for the maintenance and support of the existing (bespoke) software package.