Sector(s)

Project Team

Other organisations involved: 

Team members: 

Core Delivery Support Team

  • Akhil Bhandari - Engagement Manager
  • James Gollan - Program Architect
  • Greg Netsas - Level 2 support
  • Mark Calvert - Level 2 support

Tool Improvements

Platform Enhancements

Migration Support

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Organizations Involved

The Department of Finance initiated a project to move 25 websites from a multitude of content management systems to GovCMS D8. This would deliver many benefits to the 25 government agencies, including increased website security.

About the project

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Department of Finance’s challenge

Finance identified 25 high-value government websites that were all on disparate platforms, with differing levels of security, ease-of-use and total cost of ownership (TCO). Manually migrating 25 individual sites would have taken a considerable amount of time, and the process would have had significant overheads to ensure content was migrated accurately. This was especially the case for large volume sites like the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), which also had a complex information architecture structure with content that was up to 11 levels deep. An efficient and accurate process was needed to quickly map and migrate content from each of the different platforms (ranging from Sharepoint to WordPress) on to GovCMS Drupal 8.

The sites varied from small, 10-page brochureware websites with minimal content publishing to the DFAT site with 29,000+ pages and approximately 50,000 files.

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Department of Finance’s transformation

Salsa Digital used the Merlin migration tool to migrate all 25 websites. 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. We migrated 25 non-GovCMS websites to the default, out-of-the-box GovCMS D8 over six months. 

The technical migration automation process was coupled with a comprehensive stakeholder change management process to ensure both the technical GovCMS system and the business owners and users were transitioned onto the platform and into the GovCMS community as smoothly as possible.

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The outcomes

The benefits of migration to GovCMS included: 

  • Reduced TCO for the government agencies
  • Easier content management and administration via one CMS (GovCMS/Drupal)
  • Access to reusable GovCMS modules and components
  • A truly open source, open platform solution
  • Access to the Drupal community’s contributions to continue to grow
  • Improved overall user experience leveraging the Australian Government’s Design System 
  • Responsive sites, so websites can be viewed on desktops, tablets and smartphones
  • Accessible sites (built-in WCAG2.0AA compliant tools)
  • A secure environment
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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.

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 distribution provided an uplift in hosting and security, with an improved publishing experience. GovCMS SaaS hosting package also provides a facilitated helpdesk function to simplify ongoing issue management.