Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade website live on GovCMS

DFAT site live

The GovCMS community welcomes the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) corporate website to the growing list of government websites that have been migrated to the GovCMS platform. Part of a Department of Finance-led website migration project, the DFAT site is the last of 25 sites to move across in the six-month project, which finished in late 2019.

DFAT previously hosted their website on an internal SharePoint system that was scheduled for decommissioning, and the agency needed to update the platform solution while also rationalising their administrative management across their multiple sites (Salsa also moved DFAT’s three other Minister sites in the Finance migration project in December 2019) while having a flexible and secure solution like GovCMS SaaS Drupal 8.

This behemoth of a website hosts over 30,000 pages, 26,000 files and 16,650+ images, with the publishing team of just a few staff making up to hundreds of content changes per week.

Salsa used our Merlin migration automation tool to lift and shift every piece of content, completing the mammoth task of the site’s entire content being moved and built into its new Drupal content structures in a mere four days. Merlin was able to rebuild the complex information architecture (IA) of the DFAT site, which in many areas had content structures 11 levels deep. Merlin is an open source migration framework deliberately crafted to lower the barrier to migrate legacy and proprietary sites onto standardised/consolidated platforms such as GovCMS.

Key outcomes for DFAT’s new site:

1. Improved content administrator experience

2. Increased flexibility in content design and creation

3. Responsive design

4. Ability to grow and enhance the site in the future

5. Highly available and resilient platform

DFAT can now give their publishing team the flexibility to build engaging content and page layouts without coding, while managing their high-traffic publishing needs with ease — all while on a platform that will meet their high availability and resilience requirements.