Attachment_02_W_UGA-2019-2020_website-Scope_of_Work_05012019.doc

12456819C0019

SRS Athens, GA EFETAC Website Admin

ATTACHMENT 02

SCOPE OF CONTRACT/STATEMENT OF WORK

EFETAC WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT & SUPPORT – 2019/2020

The USDA Forest Service’s Eastern Forest Threat Assessment Center (EFETAC) proposes that the University of Georgia’s (UGA) Southern Regional Extension Forestry (SREF) will serve as the sole source provider (contractor) for the design, development, support and hosting of EFETAC’s front-facing website located at https://www.forestthreats.org and redwood.forestthreats.org. UGA’s SREF will work closely and in conjunction with EFETAC to continue to provide these website services and other professional and technical services to effectively and efficiently develop and enhance EFETAC’s website presence and other technology products.

PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE: August 1, 2019 thru July 31, 2020 Contractor Qualifications & Responsibilities UGA’s SREF is uniquely positioned to carry out this contract because of 1) its expertise and experience in developing, supporting and hosting Zope/Plone, an open source content management (CMS) software application environment and platform used exclusively on the EFETAC website and 2) its successful history in facilitating regional Extension and technology transfer education programs among the 13 southern land-grant universities, the USDA Forest Service, state forestry agencies and others within the southern forestry community extension foresters.

SREF in conjunction with UGA shall provide all services, personnel, facilities, materials, and supplies required for the performance and completion of the project outlined herein, except where otherwise specified. SREF is headquartered at The University of Georgia, Southern Regional Extension Forestry. Intermittent travel may be required to engage with EFETAC staff and partners in Asheville, Raleigh, and Research Triangle Park, NC or as needed to maintain the hardware servers hosting the EFETAC website located at the University of Georgia, Athens, GA.

All tasks described herein are to be accomplished under the direction and supervision of EFETAC’s Lead Communication Staff. Under the guidance and supervision of the Southern Regional Extension Forester and UGA SREF’s IT Management, all tasks performed by UGA’s SREF will be accomplished by qualified Information Technology Specialists and Extension Specialist as necessary and appropriate to complete UGA SREF’s responsibilities and performance under this contract. UGA’s SREF staff shall keep abreast of the latest technologies and techniques related to its systems and development environment to help ensure relativity of the EFETAC website and its functionality and tools.

The objectives include:

· Provide a secure website hosting environment;

· Provide a secure public facing website using secure connections via HTTPS;

· Provide domain specific email services;

· Review of current technology and advise on effective technology delivery methods via personal computers, tables and smart phones.

· Review website features and recommend enhancements and other updates to maintain content viability and currency;

· Assist with the design, development and implementation of new features and applications;

· Monitor and update security and other operating and hosting features as needed;

· Provide in-depth website statistics on visitor and content access; and

· Provide secure website data backups.

Statement of Work

To accomplish the objectives, UGA’s SREF will provide IT Specialists to perform the following services:

Server, Workstation, Security and Infrastructure Maintenance

UGA’s SREF shall provide stable and secure applications and systems in its continuing development and support of the EFETAC website. Telecommunications and network access and project management tools shall also be made available for UGA’s SREF staff to adequately manage, plan and communicate directly with EFETAC staff and other related parties for the development, support and maintenance of the project and its activities. To ensure website compatibility with the site’s client base, UGA’s SREF shall utilize the appropriate computer hardware and software in the support and development of the EFETAC website and shall include the latest versions of the most popular web browsers, PC’s and operating systems. UGA’s SREF staff shall maintain current in their understanding and technical use of the architecture used by the EFETAC website by attending or participating in leading technical training classes, workshops, seminars and/or online training. UGA’s SREF activities and tasks related to this section include:

1) Monitor and maintain secure hardware (servers, developer laptops/ancillary equipment and networking equipment) used to develop and host the EFETAC websites;

2) Maintain and update the server operating systems and programming environments to adhere to all security directives issued by the US Department of Homeland Security and to ensure the operating systems and programming environments are supported by their respective vendors for potential security patches.

3) Maintain and update or provide secure subscription services (as needed) for systems, programming, tele-communications, networking, internet, project management and applications software (including but limited to Bind, Varnish, Pound, Apache, Zope, Plone, Python, ssh, sftp, Acrobat Pro, Photo Shop, Microsoft Office, FireFox, IE, Chrome, and Zoom) necessary to adequately provide the services contained herein;

4) Maintain, monitor and configure (as needed) the security software at all access and development levels (i.e. firewall, hardware server, software servers, and website access controls); and

5) Monitor log files for hacking and other security threats and infiltration attempts and take appropriate actions to thwart this malicious actions;

6) Setup and maintain the domain and sub-domain name server settings.

Server and software monitoring will be performed programmatically and manually to ensure optimal site performance and server uptime. The server(s) and related hardware used to host the website will be housed in a secure and climate controlled environment at the University of Georgia in Athens, GA.

Data and Application Software Backups The application software and website data and content will be systematically backed up to ensure the safety of the data in the event of catastrophic events or unforeseen server outages and data corruption. Backup of website data and content will be made at least two times daily. Backups will be made and archived to a secure backup server on a rotating daily, monthly and annual basis. Long term annual backups will be archived and keep for 3 years.

Email

UGA’s SREF will maintain, administer and support EFETAC’s foresthreats.org domain email using Google’s secure and flexible Gmail system. Individual and group email accounts will be setup and managed under Gmail and individuals may access their email directly through Gmail’s web based email client or through any other POP3/SMTP compliant email client of their choosing. Each individual email account is allocated storage as per Google’s current specifications.

Website Statistics

Google Analytics will be used to provide in-depth site traffic statistics. Statistics will be tracked by web page, browser, operating system, and location. Web traffic statistics will be made directly available on-line to EFETAC staff for viewing at any time and quarterly analytic reports will be emailed to EFETAC staff. EFETAC and UGA’s SREF staff can collaboratively review and analyze the site statistics to identify site traffic by content and section and to help determine where website content and feature modification attention should be focused.

Website/Application Development and Support

1) Troubleshoot and resolve site errors and security issues to ensure the site’s accessibility by the general public and the site’s availability for maintainability by the EFETAC staff.

2) Troubleshoot issues, answer questions and assist EFETAC staff with utilizing the site to make content additions and modifications that are within the capabilities of the production website and the EFETAC staff.

3) Analyze and resolve issues that affect the sites performance and usability.

4) Provide individual training to EFETAC staff on the site’s functionality and capabilities as needed to ensure EFETAC staff can effectively and efficiently maintain (add, change, delete) site sections and content with minimal or no IT support.

5) Provide necessary site configuration and programming changes needed to facilitate optimal data entry, storage and retrieval / presentation of site content.

6) Provide site-level user security administration tasks such as adding new users, resetting passwords, applying security to new folders and content and adjusting workflow security. UGA’s SREF will also implement enhanced security login requirements including configurable password requirements.

7) Work with EFETAC’s staff to review and implement new computer delivery methods and applications for providing enhanced support and delivery of EFETAC’s products and services.

8) Review and advise EFETAC on the benefits and need for major ZOPE/PLONE software updates that would enhance EFETAC’s website security, speed, delivery and functionality. Assist with long-term planning for designing the next major release of the EFETAC website on new technology as deemed necessary by EFETAC and UGA’s SREF. The planning will include an incremental development plan that may span multiple years to develop and implement.

9) Review website hosting hardware and infrastructure needs and advise on upgrading to newer hardware as needed to ensure stable website and data delivery, security and data retention.

10) Provide public access to the EFETAC website via the strict HTTPS protocol by purchasing, setting up and implementing SSL certificates needed to provide and enforce the secure access; and by updating the website code to strictly enforce direct links and resources adhere to the strict HTTPs protocol. UGA’s SREF will continue to work with the Department of Homeland Security to review and implement additional security measures deemed necessary.

11) Continue to provide support and enhancements for EFETAC’s automated web based newsletter product and subscription service.

12) Continue to work with EFETAC staff to identify and implement website layout and design enhancements that make the forestthreats.org website easily accessible and viewable on the latest computer web browsers and on Android and Apple mobile devices. The enhancements will implement scalable viewing areas using responsive design where applicable. SREF will migrate existing content to the new formats as needed for a seamless transition to any new designs.

13) Provide additional design and development of new and enhanced website features as deemed feasible by EFETAC and UGA’s SREF to support changes and enhancements to EFETAC’s products as needed to keep the site current and applicable to EFETAC’s website customers. UGA’s SREF will propose and implement additional enhancements deemed necessary by EFETAC and UGA’s SREF and could include 1) mapping capabilities or other functionality for representing geospatial data relationships directly on the website to benefit EFETAC staff and its customers; 2) implementing automated website content updates based on data mining from external sources such as the Forest Service’s data services such as the Western Stub Services APIs at http://data.fs.usda.gov/research/services/westernstubservices/.

14) Work closely with EFETAC staff to continue developing and implementing additional enhancements, revisions and automation to the online and html email versions of the ThreatNet newsletter publication where needed.

15) Maintain SREF’s popular Forestry and Natural Resources Webinar Portal for the benefit of Forest Service use and will provide EFETAC access and use as a sponsor and webinar host to the Webinar Portal for hosting live and on-demand webinar training sessions to Forest Service personnel and the general public.

16) Design and develop an upgrade plan necessary to convert and migrate the forestthreats.net website to the upcoming latest version of the Plone CMS environment (Plone 6) that conforms to the latest supported development tools (Python 3 and Zope 4). In preparation of the migration, migration tools such as a data api (application programming interface) layer and other export scripts that will be designed and developed to move website content to sql data tables and other formats that will assist in the future migration to Plone 6 in late 2020 and early 2021. Migration to the new Plone CMS environment will be necessary as certain components of the existing Plone development stack, such as Python 2 and Zope, become depreciated and unsupported in 2021.

17) Prototype and develop a migration path to move the bulk of the physical hosting environment from servers housed at UGA to servers hosted by Amazon’s AWS (Amazon Web Services). Hosting the EFETAC websites on Amazon’s AWS will improve performance and security and will remove EFETAC’s dependency on specific hosting on UGA’s servers.

COR-CONTRACTING OFFICER REPRESENTATIVE

Ginny Burgess

Email: glburgess@fs.fed.us Telephone: 828-257-4354

Attachment 02