(Paid) Long-Term Dev/Supp/Intgr-Prtnr | DE/DACH region ideal

[jwiechers]

Hey everyone,

I hope this is the right forum to ask for this sort of thing. We (a German membership association, ~15k members, ~500 volunteer staff, 1 FT staff, 3 FTE staff, between 30kEUR and 60kEUR current IT spending per year) are currently evaluating options to integrate more social features into our decidedly dated website (we're also revamping the website & if there's a perfect match supporting both... well, we'd be happy, but for now this is chiefly the IPSCS side of things). 

We are currently using a mildly modified Community Suite as a forum for most of our volunteer staff (about 300 of 500) but are considering either a switch to another solution or, preferred, a planned 'relaunch' (removing all the detritus and remnants of old customisations) followed by a staggered rollout (first to all volunteers, then to all members).

As such, we're looking for a long-term partner development agency that has ideally been working with the IPB Community Suite for at least three to five years and has been on the market for at least five to ten years. We're pretty open to a variety of models, either going (almost) full service to just working with someone as an external 'on call' developer. In any case, we'd be a long-term customer (our planning horizon is typically at least five years) and there is a potential expansion to an international 100k+ userbase (our international organisation, which also lacks good social facilities). We'd strongly prefer German support, although we will also consider English-speaking developers and this isn't a critical category. It'd just be nice and make things easier for our staff.

What we'd ideally want:

- Forum as meeting space & directory service for our members
- Clubs (4.2) as facility to enable sub-organisations (of which we have plenty).
- Custom applications for simple project tracking, task management as well as agenda/order of business/record management (yes, a souped up Pages application would actually be fine for this, we just lack the internal volunteer capacity).
- Potentially: storefront for members and (or) the public, Commerce might work, but has to be able to export to specified csv to work with our logistics partner.
- Development of integrations with some of our IT infrastructure.
- SSO with our current/future system.
- Ideally: extended LDAP synchronisation, including access groups/roles/permission sets.
- As much as possible, development as plugins and mods that do not impede upgradeability, we'd be happy to pay for development of things potentially useful to the IPB community as a whole, although our main reason is that we don't want to get stuck (as we currently are) on legacy versions due to custom developments. ;-)

Our current relavant IT infrastructure (as in: potential integration targets) looks like this:

ECM/Public Website: Typo3 (likely to be replaced by a much more streamlined Wordpress)
CRM/ERP: proprietary solution, primary user database, event management, billing, etc.; we are considering splitting off invoicing, event management etc. from this backend, though and IPB may have a role to play there if we can make it work.
Directory Service: slapd (synchronisation of most services with the ERP, we *would* like to also synchronise group memberships/permissions through this)
Others:
- Atlassian JIRA
- Atlassian JIRA ServiceDesk
- Atlassian Confluence (MediaWikis being migrated to Confluence at the moment)
- Atlassian HipChat