The Australian Government is planning a whole-of-government Content Management System (GovCMS) using open source Drupal software hosted on public cloud, Government Chief Technology Officer, John Sheridan announced.

GovCMS will support more effective service delivery through the web channel and enable agencies to focus on higher-value activities that are more aligned with their core missions. Sheridan emphasised on the use of cloud services as an important step towards simplifying ICT, and eliminating duplicated and fragmented activities across agencies.

The use of open source for GovCMS will enable sharing of code, modules and applications, and is expected to reduce development costs. “We expect all code and modules developed for use in the open source platform would be made freely available for all Government agencies (and the wider open source community) to freely utilise modules developed for the chosen open source platform,” states the draft Statement of Requirements as one of the objectives of GovCMS.

The system also looks to deliver cost savings to agencies as multiple government agencies use a common and scalable cloud-based platform to host websites. It also aims to reduce compliance costs for individual agencies and make it easier for agencies to comply with standards and policies in security, accessibility, privacy and digital design standards.

The platform must be able to withstand “large scale and prolonged Distributed Denial of Service attacks” and must have a disaster recovery plan, adds the document. The Department of Finance aims to have GovCMS go live in September 2014. The feasibility study has found that between 182 and 437 government websites can be migrated to the GovCMS platform in four years.