Buffalo Grove negotiating with new vendor after website crash

Buffalo Grove is negotiating with a new vendor after its website went missing in action more than a week ago.

At Tuesday's village board meeting, Evan Michel, assistant to the village manager, said the site was down from Feb. 4 through Feb. 9, for a total of more than 110 hours.

Michel said the current vendor, Intrado, suffered a catastrophic hardware failure, and the cloud backups were also affected.

Buffalo Grove was not the only Intrado client to lose service. Arlington Heights also suffered an outage during the same period.

Village Manager Dane Bragg said Intrado was issued a notice of default because it failed to restore service within 72 hours. The village will also pursue penalties, Bragg said.

He noted the vendor did not inform the village that there would be an extended outage.

Bragg added the village was able to restore web content with the assistance of its communications consultant, Vicarious Multimedia.

Michel said negotiations are underway with Revize to provide the website infrastructure. Revize advertises itself as "the government website experts," and serves such communities as Tinley Park and Woodridge.

Buffalo Grove Village Trustee David Weidenfeld, the village's liaison for IT services, is involved in reviewing the proposed Revize contract.

Michel said the village is likely to save money on the new contract.

"Obviously, we were very dismayed by the length of time that the website was out," Bragg said.

The village is obligated under the Open Meetings Act and laws governing records to provide materials to the public on the website, and to help the public to request documents, and Intrado failed to provide the most basic level of service, he said.

The village is not looking at a full rebuild of the website immediately. The current site will be mirrored initially and then rebuilt over the year.

Trustee Joanne Johnson expressed hope the new vendor could address previous problems with the website, such as issues with the "searchability."

Trustee Gregory Pike asked if the village would be looking at other vendors.

Bragg said Revize was the best of three candidates that were reviewed.

"I want to make sure that the public is aware that we did not have any type of customer or employee applicant or other information that was compromised or breached as a result of this outage," Bragg said. "None of that data is contained within the Intrado platform."