Educational software package

Tender description

Provision of Glow Blog services to Education Scotland. Glow is a digital environment for learning and teaching and helps learners and educators to benefit from social and collaborative services in a safe online space anytime, anywhere and on any device. Glow comprises of a number of different web services that are made available to its users via a central authentication and portal service (GAPS) (currently provided by RM Education Ltd). It has four key Glow Services that are provided by Education Scotland: — Glow Online Productivity Suites (GOPS) (currently O365 and G Suite for Education), — a Blog solution (currently WordPress), — a Broadcast/Meet solution (currently Skype for Business). There are also other applications that are available within Glow, some of which use the centrally provided authentication through federated identity services. A national service desk and service desk portal provides support to Glow customers, offered by the Authentication provider via the telephone and online, to the Glow customers. The service desk also takes support calls for defined Glow services, passing such calls over to the relevant supplier but ensuring Glow Customers have a single point of contact. There is a requirement for the Glow Blogs host and support contractor to provide a service desk function to further enhance this for Glow Blogs specific incidents and requests. The national Service Desk facility provides second line support and is open to a defined list of Glow Users within each Glow Customer. The service desk is available 0800 – 1800, Monday to Friday, 52 weeks a year with the exception of Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year’s Day and 2nd January. Service desk calls vary across the year, with volume of calls substantially higher during term time although calls are still received during school holidays. There will be four constituent work packages: Overview (A) Infrastructure Improvements and Migration. The Glow Blogs service is currently hosted on Amazon Web Services. The Purchaser would like to improve the infrastructure and hosting of the service to improve performance and user satisfaction. The Purchaser has commissioned a third party Technical Architect to design a new Target Architecture for Glow Blogs and now seeks support to build and migrate to that Target Architecture. This section covers the requirements for this build and migration effort. (B) Application Hosting and Support. This section covers the requirements for ongoing hosting and application support for Glow Blogs. This includes hosting, service management, service desk, maintenance and support. (C) Application Improvements. This section covers the requirements for a number of improvements to the Glow Blogs service that the Purchaser wishes to make within the current calendar year. The Purchaser seeks support for this development work. (D) Call-off Contract for Development Support. This section covers the Purchasers requirements to establish a call-off contract for development support throughout the lifetime of this contract in order to provide support to maintain and improve the Glow Blogs service through time.