Victoria’s Better Health Channel — site migration to SDP

DHHS’s challenge

Victoria’s Department of Health and Human Services’ Better Health Channel was built on an old version of proprietary content management system (CMS) SiteCore. The cost to upgrade was prohibitive, with an extremely high total cost of ownership (TCO). 

DHHS’s transformation — site migration onto SDP

Salsa Digital’s original site assessment included a detailed feature matrix and requirements mapping, which fed into the discovery process for the migration project. Discovery helped us further understand the requirements and write agile user stories. Working with DHHS, we created a roadmap to identify MVP and priorities and then moved into the build phase. 

The project was broken into four main streams:  

• Platform provision — Setup and configuration of the SDP instance for DHHS. This included a central content repository that can be used for all DHHS sites in the future (SDP Drupal 8).

• Content migration — For content migration Salsa Digital built and used a generic migration tool that caters for many different source and target platforms. This automated tool, Merlin, works in unison with other migration project activities. Finding Records and Better Health Channel were the first projects that migrated to SDP using Merlin. Since then, Salsa Digital has open sourced Merlin so others can also benefit from easier migrations at reduced costs. 

• Functional stream — Mapping requirements to existing functionality available in the SDP Drupal distribution. We focused on building content structures/types that replicated the existing SiteCore content types so Merlin could migrate existing pages into the new content types set up in SDP. 

• User-centred design — Our design partners Today worked on user research, user-centred design and frontend theming for the new site, focusing on creating the new content types and an improved user experience.  

"The Better Health Channel migration was a substantial exercise. Throughout the project, Salsa Digital brought great expertise and professionalism to the work. Salsa Digital constantly found ways to deliver value for money. Our experience on the project was that Salsa Digital worked with integrity, and their people were motivated by doing their best work and building great relationships with the team.”

Damien Dempsey, Director, Communications and Creative Services
Department of Health & Human Services

The outcomes — quick, easy and low-cost site migration

The outcomes and benefits for DHHS and specifically the Better Health Channel include:

• A new, user-centred design (via Today) with improved usability backed by user research 

• Fast and cost-effective site migration via our migration tool, Merlin

• Reduced ongoing TCO — moving from the proprietary SiteCore to SDP

• Alignment to Victoria’s whole-of-government digital open source, Drupal platform 

• Access to the Drupal community’s contributions to continue to grow Single Digital Presence

• Responsive site that works well on mobile devices

• Accessible site (built-in WCAG2.0AA compliance tools)