Tasmania's Education Dept codes small
Tasmania's Department of Education will shortly appoint a panel of software development suppliers as it looks to shore up resources for numerous small-scale programming projects.
Despite having responsibility for education in one of Australia's smallest states, the department is still one of the nation's largest users of information technology. It looks after Tasmania's public schools, state and public libraries, state archives, and adult education opportunities past the high school system.
"Over the past three years, the department engaged a small panel of vendors to provide a range of software system services," the department wrote in tender documents released this week, noting it wished to refresh the panel -- and it would consider sole traders for some of the work.
"The focus of the tender is for the development, maintenance and support of applications. Most projects let under this system will have a value of under AU$100,000. Projects with a higher value will usually go to tender."
Although the department maintains a diverse IT environment composed of Windows, Unix and Linux servers, in the tender documents it appeared to place an emphasis on Windows-based development.
Its software development platform utilises Microsoft's Access, Visual Studio.NET, Visual Basic, Visual C++, ASP and SQL technologies. Sun's Java and J2EE platforms also got a look-in, along with the AJAX Web development paradigm.
The department's wider ICT environment is based on Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6.0.