Using the Drupal Services Panel

Cathy Wells and her team took a novel approach to migrate seven websites to the GovCMS SaaS platform.

‘Our websites were previously built in an environment that was never meant to be a content management system. It was overly complex to use and our website content wasn’t as secure as it needed to be,’ said Cathy.

‘To provide the maintenance our existing websites desperately needed was going to mean the websites would be down for four days which just wasn’t possible.’

Cathy and their team met with other government agencies who had recently migrated to GovCMS SaaS to hear about their experiences. This led to approaching the Drupal Services Panel and proposing a novel approach.

‘The Drupal panel was really responsive, so much so that we decided to use two companies from the panel on two different websites at the same time. This gave us the opportunity to assess the different styles of the contractors and decide who we wanted to use on our future websites.’

‘Using two contractors provided greater assurance that the websites could be delivered on time. We didn’t have to waste time looking for a new contractor if the first didn’t work out.’

Cathy Wells presenting her story at the GovCMS Mega Meetup ‘Two providers may have made it faster to migrate websites but it also meant double the paperwork.’

In June 2019, Cathy and her team successfully migrated their seventh website. While their old environment was only hosting two websites they were finally able to patch it inhouse.

‘During the process, we decommissioned a couple of websites we no longer needed. The last website we are working on has 8.5 thousand pages, so it’s a big job. It’s due to go live in three weeks,’ said Cathy. Watch this space!