Maintenance
Keeping your website up and running requires maintenance. Maintenance tasks include keeping your website’s content and project access up to date, making design enhancements, and procuring service providers for development work.
On this page
Ongoing project support
For both Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) websites it’s important to make sure you have an ongoing arrangement in place for support for your website project after it has gone live for future updates.
Much like the onboarding process, you may require a service provider to provide this support.
If you’re using the PaaS platform to host your website, GovCMS requires you to show that you can maintain and support your projects. Owners of PaaS-hosted sites are responsible for security updates, patching and general updates to the Drupal Content Management System (CMS) software used by their site.
If you get behind on security updates, the GovCMS team will step in and make these updates for you. This will mean additional costs that will be billed to your project. If you don’t have an in-house team with the right skills or capacity to take on this work, you’ll need to make a support arrangement with a service provider.
The GovCMS Drupal Services Panel (DSP) makes this process much simpler, and currently includes 17 GovCMS approved service providers that specialise in Drupal. The Drupal Services Panel Product and Services Guide provides information on all 17 vendors so you can make the right choice for your project.
More information on the Drupal Services Panel and other procurement methods can be found at finding a developer.
GovCMS community
Joining the GovCMS platform gives you access to an open-source community of individuals willing to share their skills, experience and expertise on GovCMS.
Our community interacts through two core channels.
On GovTEAMS you can connect with other GovCMS customers on discussions and topics of interest, and stay informed on GovCMS announcements and events. This community is free and constantly evolving.
You and your developers may also be interested in joining the GovCMS Slack channel, where more technical topics are discussed.
Platform status
The GovCMS platform has a 99.9% uptime, and we provide regular status updates to make sure you’re aware of everything relating to the platform.
Subscribe to the GovCMS status page to be informed on GovCMS maintenance windows and to be notified of platform status updates.
Visit GovCMS Status to subscribe.
If you are a current customer and have been involved in the onboarding process of a new GovCMS site, you may be registered to receive these updates automatically via email. If you wish to stop receiving these, please contact us.
Distribution updates
GovCMS releases an update to our distribution approximately once a month. This is automatically applied for our Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) customers and available to everyone on the platform.
Release notes are sent to customers for these periodic releases to keep them informed of the changes. You can subscribe or unsubscribe from these updates online.
User accounts, access, roles and permissions
It is a good security practice to review user accounts, accesses, roles and permissions on a regular basis. This includes disabling and/or removing accounts for staff or service providers who no longer need access.
Monitoring user accounts to ensure they have the right level of access for the role is important to minimise risk. Site administrators can review user and account access from the People page when logged into their website.
Service Desk
Having access to the GovCMS Service Desk is important, so you are able to raise tickets for issues, requests and questions relating to your site. It is also where you will find the GovCMS Knowledge Base. You may already have an account if you were involved in the onboarding process for your site.
If you require an account, you can ask someone in your organisation with access to raise a service desk ticket on your behalf to request an account be created for you. You will need to provide your name, email address, the organisation or website project you are working for, and, if possible, a contact phone number. If a service provider requires a service desk account or access to GitLab, you’ll need written approval from an organisation representative (EL1 equivalent or above) before we can action the request.
If you are unable to get in contact with someone who has an account to log a ticket for you, you can contact us to request an account.
For more information on accounts, permissions and the service desk, please visit the following links:
GovCMS Service Desk Hours & SLA Considerations
Business Impact: What the Ratings Mean
GovCMS Service Desk: In and out of scope requests
GovCMS training and resources
If you're looking to increase Drupal capability in your organisation, going to be assisting in the maintenance of your website or want some training to be able to make changes in the future, GovCMS offer both a Content Administration and Site Builder course.
These courses are run throughout the year as both face-to-face and online sessions. More information on these courses, including pricing and dates can be found on our training page.
We also provide access to our training manuals as well as dozens of training videos for free here on our website. These are also available from our training page.
In addition, the GovCMS Knowledge Base (available through the GovCMS Service Desk for those with access) is a great tool which contains hundreds of articles and detailed tutorial documents that can assist you with your site maintenance tasks.
These articles are updated regularly to coincide with GovCMS platform and distribution updates. You can perform searches with key words to find up-to-date information to gather insights and learn new concepts (or brush up on existing ones). If you're unable to find what you're looking for, raise a service desk ticket and we'll get back to you.
Other resources, including forms and templates, are available on our resources page.