 All right closing the door looks like you're all trapped now this is going to work very well. Okay welcome everyone thanks for coming along to my presentation which is about transitioning to GovCMS as you've seen for quite a few minutes I'm Glenn Martin I'm from the Department of Finance in Canberra and today I'm going to be talking about GovCMS and the GovCMS program and for agencies and vendors alike the things that you need to take into account when you're looking to moving to GovCMS. So it's an open source Drupal distribution built on Drupal 7 and when we use it with Acquia with Acquia Cloud Site Factory or Acquia Cloud Enterprise we have a whole of government security assessed open source cloud etc solution for government agencies at any level so we have federal state and local government that are on GovCMS all good and to you'll need to forgive me sometimes I'll lapse into a bit of government speak so a government entity just so you know some government websites are really obvious that their government finance.gov.au okay but government also runs a lot of campaigns and and other sorts of websites which at first blush might not be appear to their government also educational institutions and similar sorts of things so it's not just just for government to give you a quick bit of context about this transitioning to GovCMS this is where you're going to use a GovCMS distribution in our hosting environment is what I'm going to be talking about the differences today if you took the distribution to use on your own hosting you can do whatever you want we'd adjust like in any other distro you there's no restrictions it's it's not a freemium setup where we've put out there like the cut down restricted bits and then you've got to pay more to get the whole lot full distro is available it is on Drupal.org and GitHub all out there in the open we do our issues queues in GitHub so that's if you want to get involved and see what's going on definitely go to there see the conversations that they're being had through both government agencies vendors and just interested citizens basically getting right into the community get in there get involved get a part of it we're seeing some really really interesting things coming out of it the quick history is we actually went live in Drupal South Melbourne last year like last April is when when I stood up with Adam Malone the sharp dress man you might have seen from this morning and I spoke about it we have two hosting environments we have our software as a service our SAS and our platform as a service our pass environment which I'll be describing a bit more we have a hundred and five sites in the GovCMS program that are live today there's 28 in development as we speak we have 49 government agencies that have signed up to be part of the program in the next month month and a half we have about 10 10 sites that are in various states of development that are planning to go live so where I say at the moment our SAS environment is serving up three million page views a month across the sites that are over there that's going to grow dramatically and real soon and the caveat there it's possible since I wrote this up yesterday somebody has either gone live or signed up or started development since then I'm actually getting a nod from the big boss so it is that busy we have that much interest in it so as far as the environment that you should use it's it's deciding between the SAS or the pass is is what it comes down to when agencies are in the SAS environment it's it's a shared code base but it's one that is supported by the program so the case of you having to apply security security patches module updates etc where an agency doesn't want to do that doesn't have the skill doesn't have the money doesn't have the inclination we look after it you get CDN DDoS WAF web application firewall all by default it's always on we know agencies prior to GovCMS coming into being they were paying a hundred thousand dollars for CDN and DDoS alone so forget the website forget anything else I haven't done anything except put some protection in front of it and it's all sitting on Acquia cloud site factory which is hosted by Amazon web services the pass environment the requirement there must be Drupal we do prefer the GovCMS distribution but for various reasons as long as it's Drupal that's okay we have security accredited up to the infrastructure layer and as you can see in the SAS we've actually accredited to the infrastructure and application for a government agency this represents months and months of effort in saving and a lot of money as well that we've gone and done this and and hang finances name on it the pass environment is sitting out on Acquia cloud enterprise so it's it is different and it does allow agencies that want to be out on their own looking after themselves air gap from from other sites to be able to do that the SAS versus pass for both administrators and developers in a SAS environment there's no user one you don't have administrator access you can't install a module on a whim you have access to when I say there that you can configure limited modules there's a couple of hundred that make up the GovCMS distribution of that we allow you to access some of them but some we don't so the security complexity the password complexity module you're sitting there and you're thinking 13 characters this is a real pain I want to turn that off well you can't because there goes our security accreditation if we let you do that but you do have access to other things so the Google analytics you can drop your Google snippets into that and sell some areas you don't have to worry about the distribution maintenance you don't have to worry about doing a security assessment unless you want to so some agencies have come to us and said we still want a pen test we still want to do a full security assessment and that's fine for the others that don't want to blow six months of their life they can use the assessment that we've already put on it in the past you do have full admin and full code base access so you can do whatever you want essentially you can install any modules but you are responsible for maintaining it you want to drop that module in you better test it first because if you put that in you turn it on your white pages site you broke it you're going to have to fix it or find somebody to help help you fix it so this is where in the SAS environment it's an element of protecting an agency from itself because they they'll often get get the command from on high we want the latest Twitter widget just make it happen you just can't do it there because we're protecting the environment for all the other websites that are there even though I talk about that there's no admin in SAS and you can't just drop in a module and it's not to say by the way that you can't actually ever get a module that you want not talk about that in a little bit there's still so much you can do so I'm talking to a room full of Drupal people you know through the admin console as far as content displaying and being dynamic fields views blocks filters panels content types you still have access to all of those things you can still do all of those normal administrative Drupal level types that that you've had in the past it just means you need to know some good Drupal site building right the SAS because of that does mean that it is still good for complex sites we have some little myths that go around that our Gov CMS SAS it's only for really basic stuff it's not we've got some very really complex sites in their department of communications for example communications.gov.au the things that they've got going on in the backhand is really impressive so check out the site if you are interested but it does help out an agency but it's got low no good Drupal skills or they don't want to look after a distribution they don't want to have a dev team and a security team and a testing team to look after that and it also comes with the benefit that anything that we put into the Gov CMS distribution its functionality applies to everybody in a SAS environment now they might not want it but it is still there and it goes in there at no cost to them not so great for if you do have an explicit module or explicit functionality but our distribution cannot serve for agencies that love a good tinker and we know and sites that are really experimental so where you're sort of pushing the boundaries of what you might be able to do. As far as pricing goes that's large enough before I bring it up that the hosting price don't think of it as just hosting so where an agency comes on board with this you get the Amazon web services it's two data sensors in Australia in Sydney so you've got your cross-border jurisdiction there we've got a 99.95% uptime SLA it's IRAP assessed it means that it's been independently assessed up to the application to unclassified so it's Gov CMS is all for public facing websites we don't throw any wall gardens around our SAS sites manage code base CDN etc always HTTPS always on scalable there's a link for the pricing and very briefly if that's even visible you see we do our hosting pricing on page views for sites so we do start at very small sites where yeah 5,000 page views a month up to 2 million page views a month and then we have custom plans beyond that because we have some big agencies coming in. The pass again complex sites needing strong CMS it's it's exactly the same but it's for agencies with high Drupal dev skills or access to and usually access to means cost okay so it's having the budget to do it. Drupal sites that are not already on the Gov CMS distribution but you need to move hosting for some reason and those those other points there but it's not good for reducing resourcing and costs it's not good for sites that are light touch so one ones at once they're up and running that you don't really need to sort of keep using again and especially low low volume ones and and agencies that have limited Drupal and limited access to Drupal skills it's not great for because you really do have to look after yourself or be able to get someone to do it. As far as those development options for bringing a site over you've got the two ends of a scale okay so you either do all the development internally if the agency has got it or you outsource the development for government agencies they can go to a limited tender open tender depending on the value of the contract I'm not going to get into procurement here and we're also setting up the panel and so we're we're really excited about this that we've been wanting to do a panel for quite some time and if you're not familiar with what panels are in government procurement in government can be really painful there's lots and lots of lots of rules we have to follow and as an agency it's very hard for us in the GovCMS program to recommend a vendor so if an agency comes to us and says oh who can we get to build our Drupal site our answer is well you'll have to go to market you'll have to do an RFR and RFT go out lose a lot of months of your life doing that sometimes so a panel though is where we will open up the doors to have vendors apply to be on the panel there will be set criteria for what you need to do to be on that panel and then when an agency comes along they will be able to as an option they don't have to use a panel to potentially select a vendor because there's been a pre vetting process that's happened it's not set up yet we're hoping it we've started the wheels in motion hopefully early next year we'll have that going if you're interested keep an honest on on Twitter on our GovCMS website send us an email and we can alert you as well so but other than the panel the somewhere in between is for an agency to skill themselves up so that's to bring in an external vendor with the remit to take an existing site that you want to migrate over and this is an agency that might have technical skill but just not Drupal technical skill and they can be taken along on a journey to help self-serve themselves and learn more Drupal and be able to stand up more sites any questions by the way you can actually yell at me if you really want to but yeah don't hesitate to ask questions along the way and there's no questions okay so for four big factors to consider when when you're looking at coming across and it's like okay do it do I want to go SAS or do I want to go pass and I'll come into some small case studies here so the first one is considerations about internal capability and inclination it's it's really important so the boss says yeah I've heard this open source let's go cloud sounds awesome and I want you to do it now but the web team is quite literally a half-timer and that's that's all they are who is able to go out and do an evaluation do the security assessments and do all of the things that that government agency really should with this or separately okay so the decisions made to go open source this is great and you're thinking we don't want to outsource the support so you go to your internal ICT say hey guys we want to go to open source and be on Drupal it's going to be awesome can you help us and basically this is your answer so that happens a lot I love the ICT teams within government some of my best friends work in ICT but yeah when you come up against that that can be a problem so and the last one you want to you want to migrate you want to get off the mailing internal infrastructure or an external bad contract but yeah who wants to burn six months of their life doing all the research those things above that's where SAS starts looking pretty good and the case study is a SATA a SATA was our first customer that went live on the system last year they are the point five full-time employee so Nick who was there at the time never going to be able to do it small budget no in-house ability so we've stood up the a SATA site and ever since even with that small team one once it was up there and running they've been happy ever since all the maintenance all the security all the updates is all taken care for them and it's been really good inclination so this is the ATO's annual report ATO a full stack Drupal these guys are hardcore what what they're up to but an annual report once an annual report is published that even the content you don't touch again because it's the annual report right but you don't want to maintain it you don't want to update this what is now essentially a static site so the ATO chose to put their annual report into our SAS environment because we're going to maintain the distribution second consideration is does our distribution meet the required functionality so maybe you've got an existing Drupal site already that you want to bring over but it's too too bespoke to there's too many modules in there it's it's existed for 10 years and it's had the functionality creep and there's no way you're going to be able to migrate it across or maybe the ICT area is on board but they demand control they they don't want anybody else looking after it all there are modules that are drop-dead requirements pass could be a suitable choice there an example is cancer Australia so cancer Australia came across to us very recently they already had extensive Drupal holding so had quite quite a number of sites and they needed new hosting no way that they were going to be able to migrate their sites over to the GovCMS distribution but they were already on Drupal so we were able to put them into the pass environment and we're actually able to put them in quite quickly too which which was good timing so agencies have a habit of coming to us pretty darn late so the things nine-tenths of the way there and then they contact us and we have a look at what's been done it's like oh you know what guys you've really gone off reserve and we can't bring you into our sass environment or maybe there's an emergency migration bad contract coming to an end sites been hacked we've actually had a few customers come over where the previous environment security just not up to scratch or there is a module requirement that we know we're going to put in our distribution but it's not actually there as yet so we can actually have agencies that start their life in pass and then move over to sass an appropriate time the example I have here is budget.vic.gov.au hey jitma jitma you're on your phone give him an edge it's your site so we had we had a hard deadline so the budget doesn't get pushed back because the site's not ready right you don't go to the state treasurer to say sorry can you delay a few days everything was ready to be for sass except for the fact that we didn't have the services module in the distribution but we knew it was coming so we launched the budget site on the pass environment once we put the services module in into the gov cms distribution we have now forklifted them over to sass you see my little mention at the bottom there the Victorian budget and Department of Environment federal Department of Environment actually co-developed on a ccam module which was really exciting this is a module that allows the websites to pull data from data sources such as data.gov.au Department of Environment had started doing it got along to a point and budget.vic came along and it's like hey we want to be able to pull some data in and visualise with pretty graphs and tables etc so we quite genuinely had a federal and state government collaboration on module functionality which is now folded into the distribution that anybody else now has access to so that was really great for us. The budget consideration so you've got all of the capability but none of the money. Got to remember with the sass including out of the box fully maintained CDN DDoS and all of the costs there directly benefiting from any enhancements that we do this really works with a budget constrained department. The pass does genuinely have that greater flexibility there is no question about it but your cost of entry is much higher especially for sites that run under 120,000 page views a month so this is based on our small plan in the sass pricing. It is up to an agency really to decide so if you have a 5000 page views a month site we've got a perfect sass plan but if you really want to go over to a pass and have all of the overhead for what is really a niche audience site I mean less than 5000 page views you're probably generating most of your traffic out of your own department looking at yourself anyway but it's up to an agency to do that but when you're looking at budget and you're thinking about the sass you've got to never forget 80-20 I love 80-20 I live my life by this. We always receive arguments about the sass environment but I don't have full control it's my website but I don't have full control I'm at the whim of somebody else that you guys are going to make decisions that are directly going to affect me I mean we don't do this. Our site is unique where I've sass sounds great but we're really special with your informational brochure where website that's special so I've heard all of them I really have so but you know what if you could get across to an agency that GovCMS sass in particular will get you 80% of the way to the idea of perfection of a site that has nothing wrong with it and all the functionality that you want for 20% of the effort okay you can stand these things up quickly and simply in very little time it's only when you sort of flip and we've got we've got our site now but now we want the widget and the widget takes as long to do as the whole site it was itself the reduced effort means reduce cost and time to launch okay you all know this so it's actually isn't that revolutionary but countless times we come up against agencies that they see the value of proposition that is over in the sass environment thanks very much and but they're still like oh but we we're still special and no you're actually not that special I mean special to us but at the end of the day the sass of the pass it's not an either or so agencies can have both and we do have agency so ATO I mentioned already they've got their annual report over in a sass site but in the past they've got some complex sites going on so you can have both use the sass for sites that you've finished development and you're not really beyond your BAU running of it I'm not really going to change anymore use the pass for the constantly moving the things that you want to be putting those modules in pushing the boundaries you can do that the quick little wrap-up is kind of getting to the end because I just want to show you some themes real quick when you're doing a migration or a transition don't try to match your existing whatever so that whatever might be your publishing workflow that has six layers of approval in it that nobody can actually remember why you have six layers of approval anymore but that's how we've done it for the last 15 years now see time to actually throw that out and stop doing it and get a bit more realistic so it is a really real opportunity for change and we're in the team we're working on a new theme which is going to match the the digital transformation office the DTO their UI kit so finally we've got this sort of almost bootstrap idea of for a government website when an agency sitting there burning 10 hours on the discussion of what font should a heading to be I tell you you can now go to the UI kit and and there's all of these things that we are baking them into a theme for the distribution and with the theme so why reinvent the wheel we've got a lot of public themes available on github there's a link download them review them modify them reuse them any of them you you can actually get in fork it do your changes there's no restrictions it is all open source we saw via site a site earlier this was their first design is the Ackley site feel a little familiar okay where where we look at the two one of those straw man arguments that I get about reusing existing themes of tweaks are but why people get confused if my site sort of looks like the other site if your sites content can't differentiate itself from another site you've actually got bigger issues than it looks similar okay so from that though we do have an agency white site template so you can start both both of these were built off this so it's a starting point and it's only one of many but as I get to the end you can still be a unique and beautiful snowflake so the next few slide because every but remember but I'm really unique my site's really special my informational brochure where boring website so here's stay smart online okay so they they're actually under Department of Communication so you actually see their site looks quite similar to communications dot all dot gov.au there's AFSA the Australian Financial Security Agency authority there it is right in the top there currently in beta this is live at the moment they're about they're gonna cut over in about a month and the last one the ATO this is not a beta site like AFSA is this is where they test functionality looks like I'm gonna be getting a wrap-up real soon so they what they do here is put out functionality get uses to test it and then it gets baked into the proper big ATO website and so you can see the obvious differences there it's not you don't have to be a cookie cutter at the theme layer you can still do what you want now last bit about how enterprise are we so I spoke about three million pages a month in our SAS environment that's a cross 30 or 40 websites at the moment that's gonna double real soon but the biggest sites that we have in the Gov CMS program is this fellow Australia gov.au and this guy so human services those two are in the top 10 government websites in Australia and individually they're running probably three anywhere from three to seven million page years a month on their own and they're sitting environments that haven't blinked so it's not just for small stuff it is truly for enterprise level and that's how how we've built it thanks everybody I've got a question straight here in the front right for most of that I'll have to take that on notice which means I don't know the full answer but currently the Gov CMS program so the program board broadly where it's supported by the Department of Finance yes it is on well not so much aqueer but Amazon web services I'll plan for D8 so our to answer the first part of your question is a quick I don't know so you can shoot us an email we can get your proper answer on that but let me just say though the Gov CMS program we don't think that we one have all the answers or actually want to hold on to it we're actually keen for a state in Australia in particular to grab up the concept and the idea and go run Gov CMS state we've offered to mentor give everything that we have learned through the process our what the our mistakes and our successes so we don't want to run this thing for absolutely everybody into infinity so and similar if NZ actually wanted to stand up the same idea and if they can't use our system but they want to run it themselves we'll we'll tell you what we've done so yeah there's no there's no secrets in it there's no secret source and yeah we're totally open to that D8 yes we we are discussing it it's on our roadmap that's coming I cannot say when we are flat out I mean we got 105 sites already we got 50 agencies on the boil yeah it's it's coming so the question is about theming in the sass environment so the way the super high level of how it all hangs together the themes live out in github so you can do anything that you want so an agency can update a theme in github and then you come into the Acre Cloud site factory console and you pull the new versions in when we started Gov CMS in the very early days we did that because we didn't trust anybody no we just we needed to make sure that people knew what they were doing as an agency proves themselves that they actually do understand what they're doing and their theme isn't going to pull in some malformed code that then effectively choose up system resources we handle the keys and site agencies can update their their own things yeah probably the key difference is we've done the security assessment to the infrastructure and and we're happy to share that with an agency whereas if an agency just went to Acre Cloud Enterprise directly completely around and outside us they don't get to leverage that there's also some smaller light touch things about contract management that they can also benefit from if they come through us but that that's the main thing Alfred yeah so can agencies stand up their own sass playground essentially it's on our roadmap in so much as we just need a state that wants to do it quite simply so there's so many things that we would love to be able to do within the program itself but we have one limited time and our own resources and to unless somebody actually comes along and says yeah I want that really cool functionality I'm ready to sponsor it and support it put dev time into it so it all sits there waiting so yeah definitely a state running its own sass separate to our sass with their own code base and their own unique distribution yeah not there's nothing stopping anyone doing it and we want to help great so that looks like it I hope that was useful for you the last little plug there the community dot gov CMS in particular for non-technical people so github for all the issues cues and you can see whether devs hang out and chat but if you want a sort of more business in kind of discussions and maybe not as deep deep tech go to community dot gov CMS it's you got to make an account at the moment to get in we're actually going to turn that off so anybody can see it there's for no other reason that that's how it was set up you can be government you can be a business you can be a private citizen there's it's all open so there's no restrictions to go in there and have a look at it you'll see things about road map questions functionality questions in there what we're up to what we hope to do so yeah thanks everyone