The Cloud Services and Information Technology Procurement (06.01.09) policy states, in part that “UAH is committed to providing a wide range of high-quality information technology (IT) services to students, faculty, and staff in support of the mission of the university. In order to provide the best, most cost-effective, and secure IT resources to UAH, IT resources which exceed a one-time cost of $100,000, or which integrates with either Banner or other enterprise data systems must be reviewed before procurement.”
OIT uses the Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit (HECVAT) developed by Educause and OIT’s internal software questionnaire that is linked on the OIT project site to assist in the evaluation process. These tools give us an understanding of what is required to support the product/application and to properly plan for its implementation. Many vendors may already be familiar with the HECVAT and can readily supply that document. Because of the initial hardware, security, and support requirements identified in these tools, we are better able to gauge the support requirements and help identify any potential issues.
Additionally, when drafting a Request for Proposal (RFP), consider the following:
- If you want users to be able to login with Single Sign-On, then we suggest that the RFP include "must support industry standard saml2 SSO."
- If you want Banner integration, then we suggest that the RFP include "must support secure, programmatic data transfer using API or similar technologies."
- If you want the solution to be able to send email to our users and it appear to come from a uah.edu email address (to spoof UAH email), then we suggest that the RFP include "must support dmarc compliance."
If you are contemplating the purchase of any hardware or software that may meet the above requirement, or if you simply would like for OIT to assist you in the evaluation process, please do not hesitate to reach out to us. The sooner we are involved the smoother implementation can be.
PROJECT INTAKE FORM