Standards
In section two you have summarized your ICT strategies and policies and standards. In this section you need to list mandatory or desirable standards for the solution to follow.
You may wish to mandate certain database standards or the use of specific database engines and versions if you have in-house skills in supporting and using them or if you regard them as more resilient than others for corporate applications.
Your education organisation may be generally committed to Microsoft de facto standards in which case you should state that and mandate that the solution is built on a Microsoft platform and designed to use all the core Microsoft components. Alternatively your education organisation may be generally committed to open source standards in which case you should state that and mandate that the solution supports the relevant standards.
You may wish to mandate support for mail interface standards; development languages, communications standards and application integration techniques. You may wish to mandate support for specified document/content formats and data interchange standards. Especially important here would be support for government interoperability standards including e-GMS (e-Government Metadata Standard) and e-GIF (e-Government Interoperability Framework).
You may wish to mandate that the solution must support all the facilities and procedures needed for your education organisation to comply with PD0008 the legal admissibility code of practice. You will clearly want the software to have either been approved by the TNA or to be compliant with the TNA 2002 Functional Requirements for Electronic Records Management systems.
Escrow
Given the importance of the EDRM solution to your education organisation you will also want to specify that the preferred supplier will be expected to ensure that the source of each software release will be lodged with am independent escrow organisation. This means that in the event of the software supplier ceasing trading you can at least gain access to the source code.
