1. govCMS Drupal ACT Meetup
December 2016

2. Introductions Hello from govCMS

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

4. 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

5. 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…

6. 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).

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

8. 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

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

10. What the govCMS looks after

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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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.

18. Maintaining the distro
The Finance/govCMS team ‘owns’ the official govCMS distribution
It’s on GitHub -
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

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

23. How can the community contribute?

24. 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
Or raise a PR

25. 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

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

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

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

29. About the Tender govCMS Drupal Services Panel

30. 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

31. 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

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

33. Module or Theme?

34. 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.

35. 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.

36. Why we don’t give certain permissions to end users

37. 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.

38. 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

39. 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.

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

41. 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.

42. 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’

43. You asked us: What are the benefits of govCMS?

44. 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

45. Questions