Official UK procurement notice
Provision of Glow Blogs Services for Education Scotland
Authority: Education Scotland
What is being bought
Published requirement descriptionProvision of Glow Blogs services to Education Scotland
CPV: Education and training services
The lotProcurement structure
single lot · no lot value publishedLot #1Education Scotland has a requirement to place a contract with an external service…Planned
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 160,000 sites in the environment and an average of 130,000 daily 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. This has been evidenced by the move to remote working as a result of COVID-19. 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. However, Education Scotland would also consider alternative ways of providing the service, such as a subscription based SaaS model. We would ask that the migration of data is covered in the response if an alternative approach is suggested.
Education Scotland would wish to meet with potential bidders in order to seek views and information from the marketplace on the requirement. Details of this process are set out in Section VI.3 - Additional Information.
Procedure terms & legal framework
From the official record · publisher note attached- Legal basis
- CELEX · 32014L0024 Public Contracts Regulations 2015 (Directive 2014/24/EU)
- Procurement category
- Services
- Notice status
- Past planning notice
- Procurement threshold
- Unspecified in notice
- Regulatory regime
- Standard
- Commercial structure
- Stand-alone contract (no framework)
- Competition type
- Competitive procedure
- GPA / WTO covered
- Yes (GPA)
- Recurring procurement
- Unspecified in notice
- First published
- 19 Apr 2021, 15:45 BST
- Last source update
- 19 Apr 2021, 15:45 BST
- FTS notice number
2021/S 000-008229- Classification (CPV)
- Delivery area
- Official registry OCID
ocds-h6vhtk-02a796Find a Tender
Publisher note: Presentations will take place via Microsoft Teams and shall last no more than 45 minutes. If you are interested in participating, please contact Stephen Phillips at [email protected] by no later than 12:00 on 27 April 2021. Please choose a preferred date and time from the following options: Friday 7 May 9:00 - 9:45 Friday 7 May 10:00 - 10:45 Monday 10 May 10:00 - 10:45 Monday 10 May 11:00 - 11:45 Monday 10 May 16:00 - 16:45 Thursday 13 May 10:00 - 10:45 Slots shall be allocated on a first come, first served basis. If your requested slot has already been allocated, we shall try to offer you an alternative but we cannot guarantee to meet your requested time. The information provided as part of this process will be used as background to the procurement strategy and tender documents for the requirement. Once this work is completed, we shall be able to undertake a procurement process which is fully compliant with Scottish Procurement Regulations to secure the contract. Your presentation should cover: An introduction to the concept of your service; capabilities; brief use case; security of data; high level technical overview; support provided; indicative costs. This process will be undertaken entirely on a without commitment basis and no undertaking is given that any company invited to present will be included in the tender process. The presentations 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. NOTE: To register your interest in this notice and obtain any additional information please visit the Public Contracts Scotland Web Site at https://www.publiccontractsscotland.gov.uk/Search/Search_Switch.aspx?ID=643446. (SC Ref:643446)
How it was run
Official notice- Submission deadline
- —
Timeline
19 Apr 2021 → 21 May 2021 · 2 dates- Notice published19 Apr 2021, 15:45 BST
- Tender notice expected21 May 2021, 00:00 BST
Commercial outcome & contract awards
Pipeline notice- Awards (0)
- No award published
- Contracts (0)
- No contract published
- Bid statistics
- No aggregate bid statistics published
Contracting authority & participating public bodies
Official documents & specifications
Official links; attachments are not copiedNo document links were published on the notice.