Published on the 21/04/2016 | Written by Beverley Head
After months of speculation it appears that the Government’s central online site, Gov.au, currently under development, won’t reinvent the wheel…
It will instead use the Drupal based govCMS as the technical underpinnings for content management.
In a joint blog, the Digital Transformation Office’s CEO Paul Shetler, and the Government’s chief technology officer John Sheridan, have revealed how Gov.au and govCMS will co-exist.
According to Shetler; “The vision of Gov.au is to create a place where users can find anything to do with the Australian Government, without having to visit multiple different websites. “ Meanwhile govCMS represented the platform where an increasing volume of those websites’ content was stored.
The Government signed with Acquia in 2014 to use its Drupal platform running on Amazon Web Services’ local cloud to underpin govCMS. The four year arrangement was valued at up to $24 million.
At the time Sheridan said that there were around 900 federal Government web sites, and that he expected about 450 would transition to the govCMS platform which would make maintaining and managing web sites easier and cheaper. By March this year 58 had transitioned across according to Acquia.
However it wasn’t clear how Gov.au – the one stop shop – and govCMS – the content management system – would relate to each other, if at all.
Just last month Acquia was lamenting its failure to secure even an initial meeting with the DTO to discuss how it might use the platform. This month it’s a whole different story.
Shetler this week confirmed that govCMS is the technology solution that will underpin the Gov.au Beta site and will shortly become the platform used by agencies to create content for the site.
“For those agencies already familiar with govCMS, it will make adding and updating content in Gov.au a really straightforward process with a minimal learning curve,” according to Shetler.
Shetler’s decision should also spur those government departments which have not yet transitioned to govCMS.
Speaking at the TechLeaders conference last month Acquia general manager Graham Sowden said that for some departments the “emotional attachment” to the old way of running websites had acted as a brake on adoption of govCMS. Now that it’s clear that Gov.au will be designed to use information stored in gov.CMS there will be fewer emotional reasons to resist.
