We are titling this report "Do not do business with the City of Jacksonville Florida."
In September we were contacted directly by a procurement officer to take part in a bid to provide our services to the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office for a reporting system. We had to sign up to their procurement system and become a vendor. We followed the rules and did exactly that. We set the bid and waited. We won!
When we started the project, the Sheriff's office had no idea of what they wanted. They had no documents to provide in detail of what they thought they had wanted. To this day, no one will admit who put the current document together that we bid on even after asking point direct over 20 times. They will not tell us because of fear of their IT staff being not too smart. So, we had to spend a lot of time getting down to the facts of it.
Keep in mind, JSO has a rule to stick to the document only. They will tell you that they can't move or do anything else than what is on that RFQ or document you bid on and any changes, additions or any other must be in writing and agreed upon. However, they will tell you they want more and if you do not give it to them, they will terminate you and your contract causing you to loose money, lots of it.in fact, they also take advantage of this to steal your product straight out from under you. This is called 'pay to play'. Does the Illinois governor ring any bells? This happens all the time with Jacksonville Sheriff's office and it happened more than several times with us.
JSO could not provide us with any assistance other than give us a development server that we can only install on, not develop with. That's fine. However, they did not properly install the features and software on the server they had.in fact, the software they were using was illegal. The log records showed us that too many errors came up with them installing patches and upgrades that Microsoft would not allow due to the software not being registered. This caused us extreme problems down the road. We knew this and we advised them of this and we suggested that they test our final product on our servers. They refused.
We were also asked if we could provide them a demo of our other business software that they did not want at first, but then changed their minds, to be tested on their servers. We agreed and it worked. After that, they said they did not want it and to keep making the custom software they wanted. However, they insisted that they wanted many features that this other software provided. We said that we could not do that because it's protected and it would be a violation. They did not care.in the meantime, they conducted a backup of that protected software and did not tell us about it. We knew this from the log files that they indeed conducted a backup of the software. We confronted them of this by phone and by emails. They flat out denied of any backups and in fact informed us that only we had access to that server and they never touched it.
We were contacted two weeks before inauguration day, January 20 to have the final product ready. We advised them it was not ready yet and we still had one month left to go on the contract. The chief of police at that time was Mark Richardson and he was constantly threatening us that if we did not go his way, we would loose the contract. We had to scramble because we needed to get paid. However, their server was causing issues and cutting us off all the time, every five minutes in fact. We informed them of this and they told us that we were the ones to correct this problem, not us. We informed them that we could not and asked them how because the server must be manually updated, not otherwise. They finally gave in and tried to fix the problems. However, we were not able to upload our completed software in time due to this and I called Chief Richardson and informed him of this due to their server having issues. He screamed at me that we had better have it ready 'or else' and then hung up. I won't mention here his other offensive and abusive words. I had asked for an extension and also sent them an email that we need time for the server to be corrected so that we can test our product first before demoing it. He said, "There will be no extensions."
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