Glow Blogs Hosting and Support Services

Education Scotland has a requirement to place a contract with an external Service Provider for ongoing support and development of the Glow Blogs service. Glow is Scotland's national digital environment that offers a number of different services to support learning and teaching across the curriculum.

Glow Blogs is a service that is available to all Glow users to allow them to create, manage and host websites. It is currently a fully managed WordPress multisite environment which resides on an AWS infrastructure. There are around 60,000 sites (blogs) in the environment and an average of 1,500,000 monthly page views. These sites may, for example, be private and used by learners recording their work or be public for schools to share resources. The service offers users a selection of themes and plugins that have educational value and these must be kept up to date and sometimes customised with factors such as safeguarding in mind.

The AWS infrastructure has a provided a high level of reliability and was designed to be flexible with features such as auto-scaling used. A high level of reliability and flexibility is required due to ever changing user requirements, including but not limited to, an increase in remote working. The WordPress application provides a selection of themes and plugins that provide functionality based on user requirements. Both the infrastructure and application continue to be improved by taking an Agile approach to development and making changes based on user stories.

It is expected that any potential Service Provider would have sufficient technical knowledge and an understanding of how such a service should be best provided and maintained. It is anticipated that the current offering of Glow Blogs through a WordPress multisite hosted in AWS will continue to be how the service is provided.

Potential Service Providers must note that the information provided as part of this process will be used as background to the procurement strategy and tender documents for the requirement only.

This process will be undertaken entirely on a without commitment basis and no undertaking is given that any potential Service Provider will be included in the tender process. Submitted questionnaires shall not be evaluated or scored and shall be excluded from evaluation at the tender stage. Please note that at this stage we are not issuing any additional documents to describe the requirement. All tender documentation shall be available at the next stage of the procurement process.

Interested Service Providers are asked to complete the Market Engagement questionnaire. Responses are requested by Friday 03 May 2024.