Victoria’s Finding Records — site migration to SDP

DHHS’s challenge

Victoria’s Department of Health and Human Services’ Finding Records website 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

Finding Records is a smaller site and represented ‘part one’ of a broader DHHS replatforming. Much of the Finding Records work was done concurrently with the larger Better Health Channel migration.  

The project was broken into four main streams:  

1. Platform provision — Setup and configuration of the Single Digital Presence instance for DHHS. This included a central content repository that can be used for all DHHS sites in the future (SDP Drupal 8) and individual frontend applications (using Vue.js components from Single Digital Presence’s frontend theme layer, Ripple). 

2. 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. 

3. Functional stream — Mapping requirements to existing functionality available in the SDP Drupal distribution Tide. 

4. User interface stream — Visually mapping basic UI elements from the original site onto out-of-the-box UI elements on Ripple.   

With Finding Records, the goal was to stick with SDP out-of-the-box as much as possible. In the end, we did need a few minor customisations.  From a theme point of view, we used Ripple out-of-the-box, except one new component was created, and the Finding Records colours and brand were applied. From a backend perspective, one new content type was created to handle ‘guides’ content (a particular type of content on Finding Records website). 

“We are really happy about the work Salsa did on this project.  Salsa brought substantial expertise to the work and their commitment to working closely with us to address our goals was highly valued by 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 Finding Records site include:

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

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

• Easier content management across DHHS going forward via one CMS (all websites centralised into one backend CMS)

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

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

• Access to continual improvements of Single Digital Presence

• Responsive sites, so websites can be viewed on desktops, tablets and smartphones

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

• A secure, resilient and scalable platform environment