Australia.gov.au is going Drupal through the Acquia Platform, with the site launching ahead of the official govCMS launch in February 2015. Acquia bills itself as ‘the digital experience company’, and is a company created by the founder of Drupal, with clients such as Pinterest, Mercedes Benz, Warner Music Group, and Stanford University among the more than 4,000 others. The company today announced that Australia.gov.au has launched as the first site on the govCMS platform, which is the “home page” for the Australian Government, and a central destination for digital government services used by more than 2 million visitors every month. As I was attending the Zuora event today on at the same time as the Acquia and govCMS launch, I met up with Acquia’s representatives, David Churbuck, VP of Corporate Marketing, and Chris Harrop, Acquia’s Asia Pacific Regional Director, who spoke to me to explain today’s launch and its significance - the video is below. govCMS is an officially sanctioned distribution built on Drupal, and will ‘help government agencies across Australia decrease costs and increase their agility and ability to better engage citizens with government services.’

Today’s press briefing saw the Australian Government’s Chief Technology Officer, John Sheridan, announce that ‘the first site to use the innovative govCMS platform has gone live on the Acquia Cloud, the cloud-based platform innovated by Acquia to support some of the world’s most sophisticated  and ruggedly resilient digital experiences.’ ASADA, the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority will also ‘be among the first external agencies to adopt govCMS; the full migration of the authority’s site to govCMS is planned for early 2015.’ Acquia says The Department of Finance is working with it ‘to provide govCMS, an open cloud platform for the development and continuous delivery of its Drupal-based govCMS service.’ Acquia is working with the govCMS team to ‘create common themes and templates that may be used by a variety of government Departments, Agencies, official blogs, and policy microsites. Together they’re also developing a range of procurement options and pricing plans to provide greater value and flexibility to agencies that adopt govCMS.’

The Australian Government will also offer ‘free Get Ready for govCMS training courses on Friday 14 November in Canberra, Sydney, and Melbourne. The courses are part of Drupal Global Training Days, an initiative of the Drupal Association to introduce new and beginning users to Drupal.’ As Acquia explains, ‘govCMS is an important service offering for Australian Government entities. It reflects the Government’s commitments regarding the use of shared, cloud-based services. Agencies using govCMS will benefit from a standardised procurement model and achieve compliance for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). govCMS incorporates and extends the aGov Drupal distribution, which was developed specifically for Australian government organisations.’ Acquia says it ‘helps the Australian Government meet these requirements through its Acquia Platform, which brings together key capabilities for engagement and digital experience management.’

The platform features Acquia’s Digital Experience Cloud, which supports DevOps best practices by helping engineers create and manage high-quality applications faster. The Digital Experience Cloud simplifies the management of a complex portfolio of sites for engineers and architects, helping them build, govern, and scale the continuous delivery of many experiences across an organisation while administering them from a single administrative dashboard. The Acquia Platform also empowers government agencies to tap into the innovation of the global Drupal community, connecting new applications, modules and technologies to their sites as they emerge.

Chris Harrop, Acquia’s Asia Pacific Regional Director said: “Acquia’s Digital Experience Cloud and world-class professional support is enabling the Australian government to go to market faster with a solution that delivers on the promise of eGovernment to agencies all across the Commonwealth.”