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Department of Finance

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Organizations Involved

Salsa Digital and amazee.io have been operating the GovCMS SaaS offering since 2018. We set up and architected the GovCMS SaaS solution when we took over the platform and now manage the GovCMS SaaS solution on a day-to-day basis. The SaaS offering is important because it delivers standardisation and consolidation across government websites and eliminates the problem of agencies solving the same problem patterns.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome)
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GovCMS’ challenge

When Salsa Digital and amazee.io took over the GovCMS platform in 2018, we were keen to uplift the SaaS offering. GovCMS SaaS helps to deliver consolidation and standardisation across government agencies to decrease fragmentation, inconsistency, maintenance burdens and costs.

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GovCMS’ transformation — improving the GovCMS SaaS offering

Salsa Digital and amazee.io manage the GovCMS platform, including both SaaS and PaaS sites. Since we took over the platform, we’ve focused on many improvements and innovations. These improvements have standardised and uplifted the SaaS offering.

As part of running GovCMS SaaS, Salsa Digital and amazee.io operate across three main areas:

  • Technical solutions
  • Governance
  • Support services

Technical solutions

Working together, as part of operating the SaaS program we’ve set up and/or managed:

  • A more uniform way to provision projects
  • A more uniform way to build and deploy projects through Lagoon
  • Automated deployments
  • Standardised reporting and regulatory adherence processes
  • Tooling that helps audit and maintain the SaaS offering
  • A standardised release pattern coupled with a strong roadmap that aligns with GovCMS’ needs
  • Community guidelines around updates
  • A maintenance schedule
  • Akamai purge feature for automated cache clearing and self-service cache clearing
  • Standardised CI/CD pipelines
  • Standardised handling of Drupal configuration (e.g. Redis configuration with fallback)

Governance

Across governance, Salsa Digital and amazee.io work with the GovCMS Change Advisory Board (CAB) to steer and influence the GovCMS roadmap and feature delivery for GovCMS SaaS. Since 2018, we’ve focused on ongoing feature enhancement to broaden the SaaS offering and provide agencies with more options and choices. Security and standardising operations with a goal of reducing total cost of ownership for government websites have also been high priorities for the SaaS offering.

Support services

As part of the SaaS offering, Salsa Digital and amazee.io also set up and run a dedicated GovCMS Service Desk. This Service Desk is an essential part in managing the SaaS program, as it provides support to government agencies on the platform. It uses a standard ticketing process with priority levels and methods of escalation. It’s also backed by a service-level agreement (SLA) with time frames in place for both acknowledging and actioning a ticket depending on its priority level.

Our support services for the SaaS program also cover:

  • An extensive, online knowledge base for people to self-serve
  • In-person training
  • Online training
  • Training videos
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The outcomes — consolidation and standardisation in government

  • A more standardised SaaS offering within GovCMS, to further reduce fragmentation and inconsistency
  • Improved/expanded features for out-of-the-box SaaS site builds
  • Reduced operational costs per site
  • Shared feature enhancement (across the whole SaaS platform)
  • Improved supportability and maintainability through standardisation
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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: