| Item | Description | Question | Response |
|---|---|---|---|
| R1 | The proposed LMS services shall be delivered on on-premises equipment as a cloud services hosted within the EU region, or alternatively as a multi-tenant managed on-premises solution, hosted by NORDUnet or any the listed NREN´s. | Could you define “on premises equipment”? | Please note that R1 reads: The proposed LMS services shall be delivered either without dependencies on on-premises equipment as a cloud service hosted within the EU region, or alternativelyas a multi-tenant managed on-premises solution, hosted by NORDUnet or any of the listed NREN’s. On-premises equipment can be any equipment i.e. servers or storage. |
| R4 | The service shall not impose any internal restrictions that unduly limit the access to data in the service. | Can you please explain what you mean and want to achieve with this? Are there any specific things you want to avoid putting this requirement in the reply form? | This is aimed at any design, architecture or implementation choices relating to i.e. entitlement that will limit the access to the data. Or it could be i.e. capacity between front and backend servers or storage IO etc. |
| R5 | The data associated with the services shall be encrypted in transit and at rest. | Elaborate what data should be encrypted (e.g. grades, assignments, passwords?). Define also “transit and at rest”. | The requirement calls for all data in the system to be protected by some form of encryption when stored on media (at rest) or when transported between different parts of the system or between the system and the client browser. Specifically it calls for https to be used for all web traffic and for encrypted channels to be used between (eg) a frontend system (eg a webserver) and backend services (eg a database) |
| R10 | The service support must be available during European business hours (07-19 GMT ). | What is the difference between Service Support and Bidder Helpdesk availability? | A helpdesk in this context is considered a function where faults can be reported to and known problems handled. Whereas support is considered to be above this, typically a level 2 function. |
| R15 | The service shall support automated archiving of data | Can you please specify what you mean by automated archiving? Do you have any specific requirements related to the functionality? | Specific requirements could mean the ability to archive users and courses by a simple point and click interface. It could also mean an API function to support the same type functionality. The archive storage itself would typically be a lower cost storage external to the LMS itself. |
| R24 | The Bidder shall monitor and report on the availability of the services on a monthly basis, per Customer, and report in a format agreed with the Contracting party | Elaborate what data and format. | This can be pure availability (uptime), but will typically also involve other elements relating to the provided SLA. There are no fixed format prescribed. |
| R28 | Planned work request shall be communicated no less than 5 business days before planned work starts | Is planned work referring to activates related to risk of downtime? | It is referring to all planed work that will, or potentially will affect the service. |
| Q11 | Please describe your access control mechanism and any supported integration | could you please further specify what you mean with this? | We want you to describe how access control and access policy is represented in your service. We expect a description on how roles, groups and users are combined (as applicable) with permissions to form an access control framework and how this applies to the objects and resources in the system. |
| Q32 | Please describe your incident management process | could you give us more information what you mean by this? What constitutes and “incident”? Do you need profiles of the respective team? | An incident is an unplanned interruption to, or a reduction in the quality of the Service. We want you to describe the processes that are in place to secure restoration of normal service operation. We are not interested in employee profiles or capabilities in this case. |
| Q43 | Please describe in detail the professional support services | What kind of support do you mean? End-user support or technical support? | Both, this could be relating to ie. implementation, integration, training etc. |
| Q42 | Please describe how customers access documentation and your process for keeping documentation up to date. | Could you define what documents (i.e. user documentation) ? | It relates to both user, admin and in the case of on-premise ie. system requirements etc.. The how relates to, will it be available directly from a web site, must it downloaded, or is it distributed in an other way? Depending on the answer to the above, describe how you will ensure that the documentation available is up to date. |
| Q48 | Please propose your approach to benchmarking during the life of the Framework Agreement | What type of benchmarking is meant? | What is meant is benchmarking against comparable products in the market. |
| Other | Does NORDUnet prefer demo in local language i.e. Swedish and Danish or in English? | English is the preferred language. | |
| Can NORDUnet please provide a list of all the participating NREN member institutions who may be subject to this agreement and a projection of expected take up of the agreement by country (e.g. number and size of institutions expected to contract using the framework during 2017, 2018, 2019)? | The tender is run on behalf of NORDUnet and the NRENs in Denmark (DeIC) and Sweden (SUNET), with the intention to provide the service as an opt in service to their respective constituencies of connected institutions. There are no guarantees on the actual uptake of the service. A list of eligible institutions can be found at the respective NREN’s web sites. https://www.deic.dk/tilsluttedeInstitutioner https://www.sunet.se/anslutna/ | ||
| What is the expected size of the user base and concurrency ? | The tender is run on behalf of NORDUnet and the NRENs in Denmark (DeIC) and Sweden (SUNET), with the intention to provide the service as an opt in service to their respective constituencies of connected institutions. There are no guarantees on the actual uptake of the service. With the above reservations the maximum potential userbase of university students and employees exceed 360.000. | ||
| Can NORDUnet please confirm if participating NREN’s member organisations will be exclusively bound by the framework agreement agreed as part of this process or will individual institutions still be free to contract for LMS software and services with suppliers directly outside of the framework should they wish? | There is no exclusivity. The benefit for the NREN’s and their connected institutions are that they can buy from the framework without having to go through their our tender process. | ||
| Can a consortium of partners participate in the tender. If yes, is there a specific form that needs to be submitted ? | Yes, the information will need to be provided as part of the ESPD form. | ||
| Can we expect any hardware support from the NORDUnet team; If a vendor chooses to go with on premise installation ? | At cost, both NORDUnet and the respective NREN’s are capable of providing equipment hosting and if so desired an IaaS and storage platform that the service can run on.
| ||
We are struggling with this ESPD form. Can we write our comments and answers on the PDF version, scan the document and place it in Box ? | The approach described with a scanned copy is acceptable. | ||
We are about finalize our response in ITSOP Volume 2 reply form and have a challenge when it comes to the limitation of 100 pages in total. We have used pictures, tables, graphs etc. that illustrates the system to make our response more tangible but with result that we used 134 pages plus one appendix of 10 pages describing our complete process adding new customers to the service. All answers are under the limit of 1500 words except the appendix that has 2724 words. | The aktual response must be limited to 100 pages. You can provide additional information in type of appendixes, that supports the responses. | ||
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