This speech was given as the opening keynote address to the DrupalGov Canberra Conference on 22 August 2014.

The presentation discuss the use of Drupal as the platform for the GovCMS project being developed by Technology & Procurement Division of the Department of Finance.

The scope of the presentation is shown on this slide.

When we rebuilt australia.gov.au in the late 2000s, we used a proprietary system and an outsourced provider. The system was then quite complex as it had to manage the MyAccount function as well as the more general serving of information about Australia, the Government, and its services.

While effective, the system was expensive to maintain and amend, hosting and licence costs were high, and there was very little flexibility. Changes to the system took a long time and lots of resources. It was unsustainable.

The move of MyAccount to DHS to become MyGov gave us a significant opportunity to rebuild oz.gov in a modern, cost effective way. We wanted an easy to support system, that reflected the open source software policy. Based on our experience with www.govspace.gov.au, we knew the broad parameters of what was required and how we needed to proceed.

We decided to survey the open source CMS market to determine the best way ahead. The survey is published on our blog at http://www.finance.gov.au/sites/default/files/DoFD%20CMS%20Review%20Report%...

While there were three options that looked workable, Drupal was the most used and most supportable. This was a crucial point for us. While WordPress is very widely used and we are very familiar with it, Drupal has more enterprise level deployments.

We particularly liked the way Drupal can be extended even over the extensive capability provided 'out of the box' so to speak. Community and 3rd party support was important to us, particularly as we looked to widen use of the platform in our new project directions. Its modular nature also allows us to add capability in a measured and reusable manner.

Of course, we were also impressed with the wider use of Drupal by other government agencies, here and overseas. Its use by whitehouse.gov is an important case in point.

Following the rebuild and successful launch of australia.gov.au on Drupal in a hosted service and the subsequent similar work we conducted on finance.gov.au, we turned our attention to plans for a whole of government content management system to support non-complex web sites for government.

We launched our work on GovCMS on our blog and it has been a very popular topic for consultation - http://www.finance.gov.au/blog/2014/05/07/seeking-industry-comment-on-govcm...

The most discussed topic was the choice of Drupal. This received a lot of coverage in the media and elsewhere.

http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/544726/australian_government_likely...

http://idm.net.au/article/0010039-drupal-cloud-unite-australian-government-...

http://delimiter.com.au/2014/05/08/govt-shift-450-sites-drupal-cloud/

GovCMS will provide standardised, cost effective websites for government agencies. We will launch in September for our flagship sites - australia.gov.au and finance.gov.au and then work up a range of exemplar sites over the next three months before opening it for wider use in 1Q15.

Following the rebuild and successful launch of australia.gov.au on Drupal in a hosted service and the subsequent similar work we conducted on finance.gov.au, we turned our attention to plans for a whole of government content management system to support non-complex web sites for government.

We launched our work on GovCMS on our blog and it has been a very popular topic for consultation - http://www.finance.gov.au/blog/2014/05/07/seeking-industry-comment-on-govcm...

The most discussed topic was the choice of Drupal. This received a lot of coverage in the media and elsewhere.

http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/544726/australian_government_likely...

http://idm.net.au/article/0010039-drupal-cloud-unite-australian-government-...

http://delimiter.com.au/2014/05/08/govt-shift-450-sites-drupal-cloud/

GovCMS will provide standardised, cost effective websites for government agencies. We will launch in September for our flagship sites - australia.gov.au and finance.gov.au and then work up a range of exemplar sites over the next three months before opening it for wider use in 1Q15.

We will also look to move some of our other work onto the public cloud platform, in accordance with government policy and continue to pursue open sources solutions where this is the best way to get value for money.

Questions if there is time