Provision of support, maintenance and development services, for a Pobal External Collaboration solution and associated support and services

Pobal (The Contracting Authority) seeks to establish a single party framework agreement with a suitably qualified tenderer for the provision of hosting, licencing, support, maintenance and development services, for the Contracting Authority’s External Collaboration solution, and associated support and services as per the specific requirements outlined below. Tenderers must be capable of supporting the existing solution, facilitate the expansion of the present functionality, and also have proven capability to support the Contracting Authority with potential future enhancements such as AI technology. The Contracting Authority has a requirement to continue support for their existing External Collaboration solution – only Extranet User Manager (EUM) service is used at the moment. The Contracting Authority uses EUM to enable an external set of users (approx. 30,000) to access training for the Better Start programme on the Contracting Authority’s in-house Learning Management System (LMS). Better Start National Early Years Quality Development is a national initiative established by the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth. Better Start promotes quality and inclusion in Early Learning and Care (ELC) settings for children from birth to six years of age in Ireland – the Contracting Authority coordinates the delivery of Continuing Professional Development to the 30,000 people involved in the Early Learning and Care sector via the LMS system, all year round. The EUM service is also used to enable access for other business systems that the Contracting Authority manage. In these cases, we are using the EUM service to allow external users to register for access to cloud CRM systems (Power Platform systems in this instance). This may grow over time as the Contracting Authority implement more CRM systems for clients. The Contracting Authority have a central ICT team to manage all technical services and will be the recipients of this service. The initial contract is to manage, develop and monitor the current External Collaboration solution; increase the usage and functionality of the External Collaboration solution for a period of two (2) years. The full list of requirements are contained within the tender documents. All responses must be uploaded in a ZIP FILE format.