Salsa Digital and amazee.io to build next generation GovCMS platform

Media release: Salsa Digital and amazee.io to build next generation GovCMS platform

Yesterday Salsa Digital and the Australian Department of Finance signed a three-year contract to build the next evolution of GovCMS. In partnership with amazee.io, Salsa Digital will deliver program, application, and support services, and amazee.io will provide the platform and hosting. GovCMS is the Australian Government's Drupal-based content management system and hosting platform.

TheNewGovCMSteam.jpg

Left to right: Michael Schmid (amazee.io), Tracy Styles (Finance), Toby Bellwood (Finance), Paul Morriss (Salsa Digital), Thom Toogood (amazee.io), Alfred Deeb (Salsa Digital), Michelle Cristallo (Finance), Nathan Wall (Finance), Sharyn Clarkson (Finance), Con Fountas (Salsa Digital), Dania Gerhardt (amazee.io) and Azim Khan (Finance).

The new Salsa Digital/amazee.io solution will bring GovCMS onto an open source platform making the entire technology stack open source for the first time. It will also feature cutting-edge web development tools. The Department of Finance has released a technical overview on its site, which highlights many of the new features.

“This is a huge milestone for Salsa Digital as a company, and an exciting contribution to the open government and open source movement in Australia,” said Alfred Deeb, Salsa Digital Founder and Director. “We’re strong believers of open source for social good and innovation and know that our new platform, which will be built in conjunction with amazee.io, will deliver many benefits to Australian citizens and government agencies.”

“The Australian Department of Finance’s decision to use Lagoon clearly shows the need for open source platforms in the hosting market,” said Michael Schmid, amazee.io Co-founder and CTO. “We’re looking forward to working with Salsa Digital on this project and to contributing the features we will implement, so that the entire community can benefit. This is a special day for open source.”

From state to federal

This contract win comes hot on the heels of a similar Salsa Digital-delivered project at state level, Victoria’s Single Digital Presence (SDP). SDP (alpha.vic.gov.au) was launched last week by Victoria’s Department of Premier and Cabinet (DPC). SDP uses the same technology stack — Drupal coupled with amazee.io’s open platform, Lagoon. “The Victorian project with DPC gave us a great opportunity to realise our shared vision of a unified and open platform for Victoria. Now we can build on that even further with the Commonwealth for the next-generation GovCMS,” said Deeb.

Our vision

Salsa Digital and amazee.io believe this next-generation hosting platform will elevate the GovCMS offering, providing further benefits to government agencies that will flow-on to Australian citizens.

END OF MEDIA RELEASE

About GovCMS

GovCMS is Australia's whole-of government website management platform built on the open source content management system (CMS) Drupal. It was officially launched by the Department of Finance in February 2015. GovCMS provides all the tools and environments for developing, testing, deploying, managing, supporting, and hosting GovCMS websites. It also delivers a host of benefits, such as: a stable and reliable CMS; 24x7 enterprise support and proactive monitoring; security compliance at the highest level; an easy-to-use CMS; compliance with DTA’s Digital Service Standards and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines; and responsiveness across different devices (desktop, tablet and smartphones).

About Salsa Digital

Salsa Digital is a digital agency focused on open source for social good and innovation. Salsa Digital is committed to the open government movement and to the many benefits this ethos provides. Open CMS, open data, open platform and open design are four key pillars that enable an open government to lower the barrier for better digital services to citizens.

Salsa Digital contributes and delivers services in all these areas, with a strong involvement in specific open source initiatives such as Drupal, Wordpress, GovCMS, Single Digital Presence, Kubernetes, Lagoon and CKAN. Over the past two years we’ve delivered over 30 GovCMS projects and trained 100+ public sector employees on GovCMS.

Salsa Digital was founded in 2003 with a legacy in open source and has grown from a home-based business to an enterprise-grade agency.

About amazee.io

amazee.io is a global hosting specialist and part of the Amazee Group. With their staff around the globe they provide secure, high performance, Docker-based hosting that empowers developers through better deployment process, local development, and unparalleled flexibility through containers. Their next generation platform Lagoon is a completely open source, secure, high performance, cloud agnostic container hosting solution built by developers for developers.

amazee.io created history last October, when it open sourced its Drupal platform Lagoon. amazee.io Co-founder and CTO Michael Schmid said, “When you look at technologies for web development, there was one key piece that wasn’t open source, and that was the platform. So it made sense to us to open source it. Now, developers and engineers can ‘look under the hood’, see the code, and contribute back. In sectors where security is paramount, particularly in government, using Lagoon as the basis for secure hosting ensures that all requirements are met without building a platform from the ground up. This means resources can be used elsewhere, increasing innovation that directly impacts citizens."

Media assets

Salsa interview with amazee.io's Michael Schmid

GovCMS backgrounder (PDF file)

Screen-resolution logos
Salsa Digital logo horizontal 800x420 (PNG file)
Salsa Digital logo vertical 460x547 (PNG file)
Salsa Digital logo b/w line 300x170 (PNG file)
Salsa Digital logo b/w line 800x420 (PNG file)
Salsa Digital logo line white 300x170 (PNG file)

Print-resolution logos
Salsa Digital logo print (AI File)
Salsa Digital logo print (EPS File)

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