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Salsa Digital migrated the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s corporate website from SharePoint to GovCMS Drupal 8, delivering many benefits.

About the project

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Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s challenge

DFAT’s site was hosted on an internal SharePoint system that was scheduled for decommissioning. The agency needed to update the platform and find a flexible and secure solution. The website had over 30,000 pages, 26,000 files and 16,650+ images. It was also a very active site, with up to hundreds of content changes made each week. 

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Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s transformation

Salsa Digital started with the out-of-the-box default GovCMS SaaS (D8), and used the baked in Australian Design System to greatly speed up the build and design process. DFAT’s branding was applied into the theme layer. A heavy use of GovCMS components automates the building of page content sections like news lists, homepage showcase, and tile-based lists — all managed from individual content pages. Through the use of GovCMS components, the site meets UX and user-centred design principles and is also WCAG 2.0 AA compliant.

For the content, Salsa Digital used Merlin for an automated ‘lift and shift’ of every piece of content. This mammoth task was completed in just days. Merlin is an open source migration framework deliberately crafted to lower the barrier to migrate legacy and proprietary sites onto standardised/consolidated platforms such as GovCMS. Merlin was also able to rebuild the complex information architecture (IA) of the DFAT site, which in many areas had content 11 levels deep. 

DFAT also introduced three new custom administrative modules into its site, making it fall into the GovCMS ‘Service as a Service Plus’ (SaaS+) offering. The new SaaS+ offering by GovCMS gives agencies more freedom — they can add in custom modules (but they must maintain them) while still benefiting from the standard SaaS offering of a fully secure and managed content management platform solution.

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The outcomes

The key benefits for DFAT’s new site:

  • Fast site build and migration — the whole project was completed in five months despite the website’s size and complex site IA
  • Improved content administrator experience 
  • Increased flexibility in content design and creation 
  • Responsive design
  • Ability to grow and enhance the site in the future, including leveraging features and modules built by the GovCMS community
  • Highly available and resilient platform in GovCMS (Drupal).
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Why Drupal was chosen

Drupal was chosen as the preferred CMS for Australia’s Federal Government through the creation of the GovCMS platform, which was launched in 2015. GovCMS is designed to make it easier for government agencies to create modern, affordable, responsive websites. Importantly, GovCMS provides a whole-of-government platform to help consolidation across government departments. The fact that Drupal is open source means there are no expensive lock-in contracts and GovCMS can build a Drupal/GovCMS community.

Screenshot of the homepage for Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Key modules/theme/distribution used:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

GovCMS was chosen as a mature, whole-of-government Drupal solution that was moving to a headless and static implementation. 

The GovCMS SaaS distro was used to keep ongoing management and maintenance as low as possible as DFAT had only a team of 3 to manage the website.

The Minisites module allowed us to create static HTML versions of point-in-time websites that could simply be managed by uploading a zip file to the Minisites module, which then runs the static HTML pages like a live site without needing a CMS to build or run the pages. This saved considerable time and cost in not having to build or re-develop 3x extra websites that had differing looks and feel and functionality but were simply a record of past events or reports.