What is GovCMS?

About GovCMS

GovCMS is Australia's whole-of government website management platform built on the open source content management system (CMS) Drupal. It was designed to make it easier for agencies to create modern, affordable, responsive websites. The Department of Finance is the GovCMS champion, maintaining the GovCMS platform. On 18 July 2018 Salsa Digital won the contract to build the new GovCMS platform in partnership with amazee.io.

GovCMS solves many challenges and brings several benefits and advantages to ultimately: allow government agencies to focus on delivering great online services and thus provide a better digital experience for all Australian citizens.

GovCMS is built by the Australian government, for Australian government agencies, with the digital service standards in mind. It delivers all the benefits of open source and a whole-of-government digital platform. 

Why GovCMS?

In the beginning, government agencies were hampered by limited resources and skills, making it difficult for them to establish a strong web presence, and fulfil their compliance obligations such as security accreditation, accessibility requirements, privacy and web standards.

GovCMS solves all these problems while at the same time saving time and money in a scalable manner. With a shared application code base and platform, implementation and hosting costs are greatly reduced. A centrally managed system also means that time spent on requirement specifications, procurement and staff training is lowered.

All this is done while enjoying enterprise-grade maintenance and support, including 24/7 extensive monitoring and management that takes care of regular database and file backups, audit logs and so on.

4 key services Salsa offers

1. User experience

We create powerful, memorable user experiences that harness the accessibility and web standards of GovCMS to resonate with the target audience.

2. Drupal website design and development

We design beautiful, user-friendly websites on the GovCMS platform, lovingly built by our in-house Acquia Drupal certified gurus (aka engineers) to fully exploit the potential of the Drupal platform.

3. Content strategy and migration

We handle every aspect of content auditing, classification and/or modelling throughout our planning and delivery. We strategise and create content, and make content migration a fuss-free affair.

4. Accessibility design

In line with our belief that web infrastructure should be made accessible to all, including those with disabilities and those who face temporary problems, we strengthen the accessibility of websites both at the point of initial development and upon redesign.

Why Salsa Digital?

Salsa Digital has delivered over 30 GovCMS projects in the past two years (see our case studies for some examples). Our developers have experience and accreditation in Drupal/GovCMS and we know the product extremely well. On 18 July 2018 Salsa Digital won the contract to build the new GovCMS platform in partnership with amazee.io.

We’re an open source digital agency focused on helping governments and enterprises become more open, more connected and more consolidated. We’re committed to the open government movement and to the many benefits this ethos provides including transparency, innovation, and sharing and improving problems and patterns solved by the pioneers before us. The open source movement has played a key role in the evolution of Salsa. Over the years, as technology and practices have developed, this commitment to open source has grown to encompass a much broader base beyond open source CMSs — open data, open platform and open design. We contribute and deliver services in all these areas, with a strong involvement in specific open source initiatives such as Drupal, Wordpress, GovCMS, Single Digital Presence, Kubernetes/Lagoon and CKAN.