govCMS Drupal ACT Meetup December 2016

Introductions Hello from govCMS

HELLO! Nathan Wall Head of govCMS Adam Leayr Technical Product Manager We both work in the Online Services Branch and the Department of Finance

Questions We’ve got a great list of questions from the most recent meetup – we will walk through these Don’t hold back – let’s keep it informal – so ask questions as we go along

About govCMS govCMS is a service created by government, managed by government, for government We’ve been running for just over 2 years – uptake is exceeding expectations We’re passionate about what we do, and we know we cannot succeed without the Drupal community, and that means all of you…

Who can use govCMS hosting? What do we mean by Whole of Australian Government? Organisations eligible to use the govCMS hosting service State and Territory Governments may opt in. Others approved by Finance may opt in. Corporate Entities / Government Companies Use of govCMS is optional Non Corporate Entities* Use of govCMS is optional *Defined by the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act 2013 (Cth).

Who can use the govCMS distro? We’re big fans of open source, so… ANYONE THAT WANTS TO

Current uptake of govCMS As at December 2016, govCMS has: 108 sites live on the service 28 sites in development 52 agencies signed up Of the total live sites: X are SaaS, Y are PaaS The is growing interest from State and Local Government departments, agencies and organisations

You asked us: What’s the role of the govCMS team?

What the govCMS looks after

The role of the govCMS team Acquia Cloud Enterprise Hosting on Amazon AWS Acquia (+ partners) Services Projects PaaS Website govCMS SaaS

The role of the govCMS team Acquia Cloud Enterprise Hosting on Amazon AWS Acquia (+ partners) Services Projects PaaS Website govCMS SaaS We manage the contract with Acquia

The role of the govCMS team Acquia Cloud Enterprise Hosting on Amazon AWS Acquia (+ partners) Services Projects PaaS Website govCMS SaaS We manage the distro and the SaaS environment

The role of the govCMS team Acquia Cloud Enterprise Hosting on Amazon AWS Acquia Services Projects PaaS Website govCMS SaaS We resell Acquia Cloud hosting

The role of the govCMS team Acquia Cloud Enterprise Hosting on Amazon AWS Acquia Services Projects PaaS Website govCMS SaaS We contract Acquia services for agencies

The role of the govCMS team Acquia Cloud Enterprise Hosting on Amazon AWS Acquia (+ partners) Services Projects PaaS Website govCMS SaaS We provide support and advice to agencies

The role of the govCMS team Acquia Cloud Enterprise Hosting on Amazon AWS Acquia (+ partners) Services Projects PaaS Website govCMS SaaS We partner with other agencies. We report to Department of Finance, the Minister and the Government of the day.

Maintaining the distro The Finance/govCMS team ‘owns’ the official govCMS distribution It’s on GitHub - https://github.com/govCMS/govCMS Acquia as our contracted service provider helps us manage the issue queue We run a weekly CAB to assess and implement updates/fixes/new features

You asked us: What’s the roadmap for govCMS?

How can the community contribute?

Community contributions Are VERY welcome! Bug fixes, performance and stability enhancements, new functionality on existing modules, suggestions for new modules and features Hit us up on the issue queue https://github.com/govCMS/govCMS/issues Or raise a PR https://github.com/govCMS/govCMS/pulls

Can we help make it better? Contribute to or start a discussion on Github or our community forum if you have a pain point. community.govcms.gov.au DON’T BE SHY

You asked us: Who are the govCMS vendors and what are their roles?

How does an agency build their site? Open market tender govCMS Panel Limited tender Acquia contract Finance In house This is now…

How does an agency build their site? Open market tender govCMS Panel Limited tender Acquia contract Finance In house From early 2017

About the Tender govCMS Drupal Services Panel

RFT Timetable Milestone Date RFT Release Friday ** December 2016 Industry Briefing January 2017 Enquiry Cut-Off Date 4:00 pm, 27 January 2017 Closing Time 2:00pm, 3 February 2017 Deed Commencement Date ** February 2017 Transition In March 2017 Services Commencement Date 1 April 2017

Which approach is right? Relies on knowing requirements in details and run a procurement from scratch A lot of the procurement work done for you Direct sourcing for smaller projects We advise and inform We don’t mandate Easy to access but smaller pool of suppliers Great for small builds where agency has no in house skills Better suited to large highly skilled digital teams

You asked us: Why are there restrictions on the codebase and site permissions?

Module or Theme?

Modules or Themes? While best practice is to achieve some results via modules, because we run a managed service we can’t support the SaaS environment unless we control the shared codebase We are aware of creative solutions being performed in themes to extend functionality, and for the most part, we don’t mind. We can, and do review theme code via a number of processes, such as initial ‘forklifts’ to load websites into the platform.

Modules or Themes? Drupal obviously supports modules per-site, however, the hosting environment doesn’t support this currently. We’re always working with our partner, Acquia, and feeding into their product roadmap. If that changed in future, we would review the implications from our security accreditation and usability perspectives, and consult our customers to determine the right approach.

Why we don’t give certain permissions to end users

Granting permissions… There are some permission items in Drupal (such as administer site configuration) that give a large amount of permissions and aren’t particularly granular. There are some really useful items we would love to give out (such as Regional Date/Time settings), they require that permission item to be selected, which grants other permissions such as logging, cron, flood control and password policy settings.

Granting permissions… Giving high-level admin permissions to customers would impact the security accreditation of the Software-as-a-Service platform. We’re constantly looking for ways to give out more permissions to customers and lower our own support overhead. We’re not about control, trying to strike a fair balance we’ve made a number of improvements in recent times, including module_permissions

Granting permissions… Currently, module_permissions is off by default and can be requested to be turned on, but in a subsequent version of govCMS, this will be turned on by default. We welcome code contributions from the community surrounding splitting permissions into more granular items that would again, allow us to offer more functionality to customers.

You asked us: What’s the process for adding a module to govCMS?

Adding modules to govCMS On PaaS – do whatever you like – but do tell us about cool code so we can share it On SaaS – the story is a bit different We encourage the community not to ask for modules, but rather explain their requirements. Often we actually have functionality available already that achieves the same or similar results. If the functionality does not currently exist, and it is not simply a niche item, suggestions will be taken on board and a collaborative decision taken by both the govCMS team at the Department of Finance and the community.

GENERALLY WE WILL SAY ‘YES’ Adding a module to SaaS? We try and be as flexible as possible, so… Unless you want a proprietary module or connector, in which case, it might be, no, sorry, please use your theme. GENERALLY WE WILL SAY ‘YES’

You asked us: What are the benefits of govCMS?

The main benefits Open source – build once, reuse with no licence fees, wide technical support base Transferable skills within government Shared IRAP Assessment Scalable, managed environments Easy and cost efficient procurement Community collaboration and sharing

Questions govcms@finance.gov.au