The Global Water Partnership Organisation (GWPO) is procuring a supplier for a Framework Agreement of GWP’s website (www.gwp.org) and all sub-sites (e.g., 13 regional sites, microsites, etc.), which includes:
1. Website development
2. Website support, service, and maintenance
3. Hosting
Current arrangements
• One EpiServer/ Optimizely CMS version 10.4.2.0 on a dedicated server. Test site is located at the partner.
• Integration to Salesforce and Mailchimp (Salesforce and Mailchimp are also synchronized between each other).
• Elastic search for both free text and tagged content.
• GWP would engage a Salesforce developer and the Episerver/Optimizely backend developer should be able to work with such a service provider especially as relates API and connectivity with other services such as SalesForce.
• Linkage to Vimeo and YouTube.
• iFramed media
• Google Analytics has been setup for all 13 regional sites and for gwp.org (individual dashboards are emailed each month).
• The website hosting is on a Windows 2012 Server at GleSYS.
• The DV SSL certificate and all domain names are consolidated on Loopia. Re-directs are on the website, not the domain registrar.
Web development
Every year, based on needs and strategic direction, GWP identifies areas that need be developed on the website. It can be anything from new landing pages, language versions of certain areas, to new features. Compared to web support, these are projects that need to be planned and estimated in advance.
Requirements
• Develop new and modify older implementations such as Mapplic, a responsive map integration (see water governance results map), forms for integrating to Salesforce (e.g. newsletter sign-up), and other services, e.g., Mailchimp, always keeping in mind a cost-effective solution, and as much as possible using standard functionality in EpiServer/ Optimizely including existing connectors and functions.
• Design new types of pages or features, if required, taking into account UX experience, graphic design and other functionality.
• All development should be tested to cater for site speed, responsiveness (including access on mobile devices, tablets and all modern browsers) and regions with potentially slow internet.
• In case of larger development projects, 5 hours or more, a Statement of Work (SOW)/Call-off should be created and agreed by both parties in which the company and the customer agrees to the scope of work and total time allocated to complete the project, including project management. The assignments will not exceed the agreed hours unless agreed to in advance.
• The company should have expertise in Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager to support e.g., dashboards and modify as needed.
• Tools (such as Trello or other task/project management tool) could be used to communicate about the web development projects and to check status.
Support, service, and maintenance
Support, service, and maintenance refer to running costs, and are based on a defined SLA. It is, in contrast to development, mainly for (a) supporting the site, making smaller adjustments, bug fixes, or other changes (b) a service level agreement and (c) maintenance of the development site used by developers before committing the changes to production.
Requirements
• The tender should include a monthly fixed cost for maintaining a development environment, a clearly defined SLA, and the consultancy fee per half/full hour. The agreement should include a fixed number of hours (for the bidders to suggest how many) of work per month and the cost for additional hours. Unused hours can be forwarded to next month. The company will not exceed the agreed hours unless agreed to in advance. If there are unused hours by the end of the contract, GWP will be compensated.
• The company should provide a helpdesk function for logging and access of support tickets (e.g., Zendesk). The customer should be able to email in their issues and get a confirmation when a technician has received it and begun work. A website dashboard view should be provided to the customer to see what is open and what is closed.
• The customer should be invoiced monthly and/or quarterly, with an itemized bill that clearly identifies the specific work done and time used for it.
• Availability during business hours, availability after business hours is an added advantage.
Hosting
The hosting was for many years on a shared server on EpiServer Everweb. We moved to a dedicated server (Shared SQL Server) hosted at GleSYS. This has proven to be a priceworthy and reliable solution. We would like to continue a similar setup (not shared).
Requirements
• The company should be able to keep the production environment at GleSYS up to date, applying Windows, EpiServer, and other server software patches and safety measures to safeguard it against hackers and other malicious attacks. Security backup must be in place.
• If the company has a similar hosting setup, all the above requirements should be included in the bid.
• The Service provider can also consider and suggest any improvements in the hosting setup to improve speed and high availability.