Invitation to Tender for Intranet refresh: content management system, website development, design, hosting and support services

London Councils (LC) represents London’s 32 borough councils and the City of London. It is a cross party organisation that works on behalf of all of its member authorities regardless of political persuasion. London Councils makes the case to government, the Mayor and others to get the best deal for Londoners and to ensure that our member authorities have the resources, freedoms and powers to do the best possible job for their residents and local businesses.

Previously LC websites were built and managed in a single proprietary content management system: Tagish iSite. The platform has reached its end of life and will be switched off at the end of the 2016 and a replacement is required quickly. Tagish is built in Classic ASP and MSSQL. London Councils needs a new intranet to replace this platform and is committed to Drupal CMS.

The bidder will be expected to work closely with a small digital team at LC, who wishes to follow an agile, iterative approach to refreshing its digital services. The contractor will need to work with the digital agency responsible for the old CMS, if possible to continue the life of the platform beyond Dec 2016 and definitely to complete the migration of audited content.

The timescale dictates that we opt for a refresh of the design and migration of content as quickly as possible. LC will carry out a content audit and update to information architecture. LC is carrying out a consultation period during August and September and requires wireframe and/or design options as soon as possible to assist this.

LC requires hosting, support and maintenance throughout, and for a period of one year. This will be subject to renewal following satisfactory performance. The contract will initially be for one year. The timescales for this project are tight and London Councils are committed to having no break in service to their intranet with a working Drupal platform in place by December 2016.

Server requirements are small. The current intranet is hosted on an AWS T2 small server. Full details are in the ITT.