Design, Development and Commissioning of a Community Engagement Platform

Tender description

To provide an on-line community of practice for research practitioners across Europe. The platform should have functionality to enable community development, activity and monitoring providing opportunities for information sharing, group discussion, profile searching, event management and similar community practices. The overriding requirement for the platform from an architectural and functional perspective is that it: Should be easy to navigate and intuitive to use. Users should find the information they require quickly and efficiently. The platform should allow for future update and development especially against changing operational requirements and new technical environments. The solution must be able to support clean and flexible multi-user usage through a web-based client across multiple PC’s and browsers, working with Windows 7, Windows 8 and Apple OS-X. Software upgrades must be timely with prior notice and schedule provided, well supported and easily applied with minimum downtime (maximum 1 day) with demonstrated development procedures, which are documented and approved. The solution should be able to handle a significant number of users at any one time with no dip in performance levels. The solution should be able to support access by users from multiple non-trusted domains. If the solution is a hosted cloud-based solution, tenderers must provide copies of their security protocols for the hosted environment.