 Hello, how's it going? Looks like we're going to be live in now. So that's excellent. All right, so great to have you here today at Drupal Gov. Today we're going to be talking about four case studies and using Drupal for COVID-19 rapid response. So these are projects that Annex Digital worked on this year that, you know, we're not on our roadmap. We're not projects we ever expected to do, but which appeared all of a sudden as we were working, as the pandemic evolved. So we're going to set the scene a little bit for this and talk about that. But first, I wanted to introduce the speakers for today. First of all, myself, Christopher Skeen, principal consultant Annex Digital. Also, Kate Hogden, who is our technical leader at Annex. And we're supposed to have Lee, but he's having a little bit of trouble dropping in. So he may join us later. Lee is the managing director. If not, that's fine. We'll just continue on. But if you suddenly see someone new appear, that's Lee. All right. So setting the scene beginning of the pandemic, nobody's really sure what's going to happen. There's a virus. It's creeping into different parts of the world. People are starting to panic, especially government. And it's governments trying to work out, you know, how do we deal with this and what do we do? You know, and they start preparing for contingencies. They start preparing for all sorts of different contingencies. They're trying to manage it at a local level. But they're thinking what happens if this is much bigger than we're expecting and what do we do? You know, and that's part of the story here. So they have to create all this new infrastructure, digital infrastructure where none existed. Some of it's informational. Some of it's about delivering services to people. Some of it's just providing data. And there's all sorts of back end services that connect to the digital services such as call centers and things as well that have to be coordinated together. So there's real coordination challenges with all of this, how all of this happens. Things that previously took, you know, two years to procure suddenly have to be set up in, you know, in a couple of days. And this creates real headaches for government. You know, how do they do this in a way that, you know, that works and is above board is correct. Then you've got all the other things you know about closure of borders, workforce patterns suddenly changing. And also having to communicate all this information, not just to your, to the people in your country, but those people who are outside the country and those people who don't speak, you know, English as their first language as well. So we've got four projects we're going to talk about today because it's such a short time we're only going to focus on them briefly and I noticed Lee has come in. So I'm going to throw over to Lee. Lee's going to talk to you, which we call COVID-19 in the border. Awesome. Thanks, Chris. So, yeah, COVID in the border. This was a really good win for us and for home affairs and the GovCMS platform. So this was a really cool, I guess, the first foray into the start of lockdowns for us. And, you know, the problem really was is that as this all was kind of unfolding, the Australian government needed to get this information out like as soon as possible. So, you know, in the background, we had content people furiously getting the right information, keeping up to date with policy changes, and then needing a platform or a place to put all this information. So, yeah, anyone, anyone who is entering or leaving, as Chris said, really needed to know what was the latest information and what do they need to do. And, yeah, you got the next one for us, Chris. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, so the solution was we were working with pragma partners who are awesome user research and strategy agency to, I guess, design this up really define an MVP. And then, of course, we got home got hold of the GovCMS crew and, you know, massive shout out to them. Because, basically, it was pretty much we want to be going live by the next day by the end of the day with all this with all this new information. So it was just a huge effort from, like, all three teams really came together to get this done, I think. And again, it's the platform and the ease of, like, where Drupal's enabled us, like the Drupal part was not hard. It was all the getting the content of getting the platform up and running and then even the even getting URLs and things sorted and stuff. So, yeah, so what was really cool. By the end of that time, enabled by GovCMS and the Drupal platform, content team were able to get in their published stuff with a proper content publishing workflow. It was all up there within 24 hours. So they met all their obligations and then even cooler, like, at that moment, we were hitting peak loads of, yeah, 140,000 pages a day over a million sessions per month. And this became, like, the start of, I suppose, the window for this kind of information coming out of home affairs and the start of all those changes and the communications. Yeah, all the communications were coming out from this website, which was awesome. And yeah, and again, huge effort to the teams there and I've done the shout out to GovCMS again, but they really pulled out all the stops to get that one live, which was great. Cool. Thanks, Lee. So right off the back of this, we finished one project and all of a sudden we found ourselves doing another one. This one was slightly different. So we talked to the beginning about lockdowns, national lockdowns. And one of the projects we were asked to work on was contingency planning for this kind of eventuality and what sort of digital information needs to be provided. There's a highly reactive and changing environment, so government policy was changing day to day, sometimes hour by hour. And they were trying to establish infrastructure across multiple teams and companies at the same time. And they needed this infrastructure to scale. So basically what we're talking about here is a portal about, you know, what do you do if you're told that you can't leave your house right across the country? What's going to happen now? We've seen this in Victoria. Okay, but this is kind of, they were thinking, you know, what happens if this happens everywhere. So this had to scale up to around two to four million users and nobody knew how fast this was going to happen. So nobody knew whether there was going to be a lockdown in a week or a month or never. It was just not clear at that point. So the infrastructure needed to be there. So again, working with Pragma, Annex assembled an Agile team for this. And we built this project, which we're unable to show you, unfortunately, because it hasn't been released publicly. We built this in four days over a weekend in late March. This was not a GovCMS project. This was a vanilla Drupal 8 project, but we did really leverage the GovCMS project here by using their front-end components. So it was the only way we could get a built-in time to utilize those. Additionally, PlatformSH were hugely instrumental in standing up the infrastructure for this. So we contacted PlatformSH on a Thursday and Friday they had fully scalable infrastructure and a team stood up ready to go ahead of contracting. And they did that essentially because of the urgency of the problem. So a big shout out to them too. And then we did a number of integrations as well. We included integration with the service seeker and various other components. The outcome, what we got out of this was as a complete solution for emergency information for the Australian people, which was fully scalable and ready to go in four days, which is super quick. This particular solution is currently scaled down into maintenance mode, but it's still sitting there behind the scenes. In case there's a moment when hopefully we don't need it all again. So I do trust that none of you will ever have to use this website. That would be the best outcome for everyone. But it was a testament to what can be done with Drupal and those GovCMS components in a very short space of time. Two out of four, we're going to throw over to Kate now who's going to talk a little bit about a project we call lovingly SVCR. Yeah. SVCR, it's a bit of an acronym. It's the student visa condition relaxation form. So this is a case study management tool. The problem we had to address here was that there were student visa holders within Australia, whose expiry dates for their working conditions were approaching and they were stuck in the country. So the department had to provide some assurance to their employers and to these workers that they weren't going to be in trouble for sort of staying. And they were also quite often involved in industries that were important for the support while everyone was in lockdown. So aged care, supply chains for supermarkets. So all critical industry support. So this had to be up and running within a few days because announcements had been made about the policies and that people would be able to apply for this relaxation. As we were preparing to deliver this on platform.sh. The department will already capturing the information and capturing requests through two other systems, which were then being manually processed very slowly and the workload was piling up for the team at home affairs. This workload was heavily email based certificates had to be created manually and then sent back. And this really slowed the team down because they were unable to have a lot of concurrent staff working on this and processing these applications. And it was also difficult for them to track which types of applications were coming in and what state they were in their processing. So what did we do with this? We turned to Drupal and we utilized Webform quite heavily to manage those conditions to create several variations of the types of applications that could be submitted and then built in the workflow management, which allowed the team to work concurrently to vet these applications and to provide the information back to this to the employers of these student visa holders. We also used Entity Print as the department needed to provide the acknowledgement back through PDF rather than just through like a thank you on screen kind of situation. Well, Webform was really helpful for us to set up those conditionals and as the policies kept changing depending on the applications and what the minister was preparing to announce in conjunction with their own legal team and their policy teams. So we had to adapt pretty quickly to add new situations. We had some in place reporting so that the team could readily see the status of the applications and how many had to be processed. And we were able to import data from other systems and clean that up so that they had an overall picture and they could report each day or several times throughout the day to see how those applications were tracking. And they could also monitor the types of applications that were coming in. And of course then we could apply data validation to that as well so that the information was more consistent. This allowed that team to change from a backlog which was piling up days and days of work to being able to process hundreds of applications within a few hours. So I think that was a pretty good outcome for them. And this site is currently also no longer necessary. We could reenliven it and we could readily build into that case study management tool. But again, hopefully we won't need to. Thanks, Kase. So finally, the last slide we want to talk to you about is probably the one I think we're most proud of here at Annex. And it's known as COVID in language. So COVID in language is the government's solution to dealing with information for visa holders and other people who need information about COVID who are stuck in Australia or here and don't speak good English. In terms of publishing a lot of information in as many languages as possible, as fast as possible. So this was originally built as a front-end capability for GovCMS site that we talked about at the beginning. But in the end, Department of Home Affairs decided to expand this into its own solution. Thankfully, Drupal 8 really came to the party here with its multilingual capability and the ability to translate English content automatically using the Google Translate API. So the combination of the excellent multilingual tools and the automatic translation has allowed the department to maintain, actively maintain over 65 languages on this website. Again, it uses a modified GovCMS theme, so we're still leveraging that GovCMS content but hosted on PlatformSH. And we have some other partners on this one as well, Pragma did all the UX for it. And just after midnight, who you might see around the events provide 24-7 support for that project too. So a real team effort to deliver that project that really shows the strength of multilingual and I encourage you to go and check it out. So the outcomes here are great. Home Affairs can instantly publish English content and translate it with the click of the button. It translates automatically. They don't have to have translators on hand. They no longer need to publish a whole lot of PDF files, so it's all fully indexed as well. And this site is currently the first link on Australia.gov.au. So it gets over 200,000 sessions per month, which is pretty good. There were some gotchas with this site with using multilingual. It's important to understand that not all parts of Drupal actually work properly with multilingual yet. So there are issues where if you're passing data through views, you can end up translating HTML and things. So there are a few gotchas to look for when you're doing that, but otherwise it does work pretty seamlessly. I'd say we're pretty happy with it. All right, so I'm just going to hand over to Lee. Lee's going to just summarize and talk about some of the things we learned on these four projects. Thanks, Lee. Thanks, Chris. Yeah, that translating of HTML into a language was my favorite bug of the year, I think. That was a good one. Yeah, so for us, like, why was Drupal the best choice here? It was a real no-brainer for us. You know, tell me an enterprise level CMS that can do that that quickly, get to market that fast. You know, it's flexible. We can use it for content or as an application. As Kate outlined, you know, we were using it for case management and it worked like a charm. And then the government support and the backing of government community makes it possible to work quickly. As I was saying about the quick response from the GovCMS team to get the COVID in the border site live. So the other stuff that we learned was really that having good, strong partnerships can make or break the project. You know, getting them deployed and getting them into production straight away is like the critical part. So, you know, I think everyone's done a, you know, turned around a website in 24 hours or some version of that in their career. But, you know, getting it to the quicker you can get your project into a production-like state just means you can get the green light and get everything done on time. So there's no, like, waiting until the 24th hour essentially to, like, should we do it? You know, we want to be ready and deploy deployable, like, within hours if possible. So the other part there was, you know, those ready to go components as Chris touched on. That was we leveraged that really well. So we weren't reinventing the wheel. We were just really getting to, like, what's important and that's the message and the content and keeping the end user in focus. Nowhere in the CMS is a good fit. So obviously we used it on some occasions. We use parts of it on others and then use our other partners for platform for some other more complicated ones. And then translation is great in dribble eight. But yeah, there's a bunch of quirks and that thing about views, like I said, my favorite bug for this year with the rapid publishing environment onboarding content teams is harder. That was just one of those. I think it's enabled well by Drupal, but, you know, things to things that we learn. Yeah, and massive shout out. I think we've already done a good shout out, but massive shout out to our partners, pregnant partners were amazing in this and led the way platform SH really quick and to respond it fast. Same with gov CMS team, which was like a massive win for that for how quick we were able to get that up. And again, just just after midnight, we're a key partner of ours and continue to be so and continue to support these websites with us. Cool. Thanks so much. I know we've got a minute left and I just spotted a couple of questions in the chat. Govind asked, is it all API based translation? Kate, do you have an answer for that one? Yes, we're using Google translate. There is some manual translation used in that site too. So critical content was identified as needing to be translated by professional services. So you can probably appreciate how important it is not to mix up information in certain cases and then the rest of it. Yes, or running through Google translate. A question from Jennifer. How perfect did the sites have to be before you went live or were they up and ashrating on the fly? So I think I can probably answer that one. They had to be surprisingly perfect actually. We really were launching these sites with as few bugs as possible. The good thing was with the current state of play with Drupal and Gov CMS components, there were very few places for bugs and errors to creep in. Most of the front-end works and just generally speaking, it's not a big issue. So that went fairly well. So thank you all for coming. It looks like we've run over our time, so I'm going to wrap it up there. Hope to see you at the rest of the event. Yeah, jump into our virtual booths if you want to talk more about those. We're happy to chat. Absolutely. Yep, cheers. Thank you. Thanks everyone.