At a glance
DH’s challenge
The Victorian Department of Health’s health.vic.gov.au was built on an old version of the proprietary content management system (CMS) SiteCore. The cost to upgrade, support and maintain the website was prohibitive, and the department needed a robust, functional, cost-effective platform to replace Sitecore.
DH’s transformation
Salsa used (the tool we created and open ) to migrate the website to Victoria’s SDP. Merlin significantly reduces costs compared to traditional migration methods. We also rebuilt the site using the Ripple component library and standard patterns, to accelerate delivery and reduce cost. The adoption of SDP provides Victorian citizens with an improved user experience.
The outcomes
- Quick and easy site migration at reduced costs
- Predictable, repeatable, automated content migrations with zero content freezes
- Lower total cost of ownership
- Replatforming to a highly secure, whole-of-government platform
“Salsa’s approach is based on regular, open and honest communication, backed by a team of subject matter experts who are highly proficient across agile project disciplines. This approach reduces risk and cost and gives greater control and visibility of the project status.”
Beau Zlatkovic
Senior ICT Project Manager
Department of Health
DH’s challenge — outdated proprietary content management system
The DH platform was built on an old version of the proprietary CMS, SiteCore. The cost to upgrade was prohibitive, with an extremely high TCO. DH initially contracted Salsa for a site assessment looking at replatforming several DH sites (see Better Health Channel site assessment case ). Following on from the migration of Better Health and the Finding Records , DH wanted to migrate one of its other flagship websites, health.vic.gov.au.
Traditionally, site migration is a manual, time-consuming and erroneous process so DH was keen to use Salsa’s open source solution , particularly given the large volume of content objects requiring migration and the risk involved in using standard migration methods.
DH’s transformation — site migration onto SDP
Salsa started with a thorough discovery process, mapping the Health website’s SiteCore features and components to SDP’s Tide (headless Drupal) and Ripple (SDP’s design system). We ended up with a total of over 110 features identified as MVP.
These were then converted into Jira user stories, with most features having three stories:
A backend story (to configure Drupal/Tide)
A frontend story (to theme Ripple components)
A migration story for the content migration from SiteCore into the new SDP feature/page
Where possible, we aligned with out-of-the-box solutions to avoid customisation and follow a whole-of-government approach.
Contributing back
During the project, we also brought DH and SDP together to discuss features, gaps, and solutions, as well as features for potential giveback. Regular meetings helped ensure open lines of communication to get the best results for both DH and SDP.
The outcomes — new site on consolidated platform
The outcomes and benefits for DH and specifically the health.vic.gov.au website include:
Fast and cost-effective site migration via our migration tool, Merlin
Reduced ongoing TCO — moving from the proprietary SiteCore to SDP
Easier content management across DH going forward via one CMS (all websites using SDP)
Alignment to Victoria’s whole-of-government digital open source platform
Access to the Drupal community’s contributions to continue to grow SDP
Access to continual improvements of SDP
Responsive behaviour, so websites can be viewed on desktops, tablets and smartphones
Accessible sites (built-in WCAG2.0AA compliance tools)
A secure, resilient and scalable platform environment
About DH
Victoria’s Department of Health focuses on policies and services for Victorians’ health and wellbeing. It covers health, mental health, ambulance services and ageing. It’s also the lead agency in Victoria’s COVID-19 response. DH is responsible for many websites across these areas, including health.vic.gov.au.