[Osia-members] Australian Gov Drupal

[Ryan Cross]

HI Daniel,

I definitely agree with you about the key differentiator of a closed source
vs open source option in this context. The blog article I liked to previous
also has a link that illustrates the research they did to come to the
conclusion of Drupal.

Its also worth noting that similar platform based on wordpress has already
been in place for several years, its called govspace. To quote John, "Firstly,
to all those WordPress fans, I am quite aware of its advantages and
disadvantages. We already have a whole of government WordPress service -
www.govspace.gov.au This service has 7261 registered users, 59 public sites
currently live, 7832 published posts and pages, and 106811 comments made to
date. GovCMS will be a new, differently focussed service - one for which
our analysis shows that Drupal is best suited, and our preference.”




Ryan Cross
ryan at crossfunctional.net
http://crossfunctional.net
O: (02) 800 800 99



On 30 September 2014 14:55, Daniel J Jitnah <djitnah at greenwareit.com.au>
wrote:

>  Perhaps I should have referenced the actual home page in the first place
>
> agov.com.au
>
> instead of the about page
>
> agov.com.au/about
>
>
> On 30/09/14 14:11, Bob Birchall wrote:
>
> The key to understanding this seems to be the last sentence on this page:
> http://agov.com.au/about
>
> My impression is that this is a commercial provider getting into a
> specific market with a product based on an open source project.  Others are
> free to get out there with competing offers.  Ensuring software is readily
> upgradable and there is no vendor lock-in might be attributes of a
> competing product someone may design.
>
>
> Indeed, nothing stopping a Wordpress or Joomla or CMS-X provider proposing
> a similar solution based on the specs available from agov. Or even fork
> Drupal to propose a completely new solution.
>
> Furthermore, to assume that all cms are freely interchangeable between
> each other is likely not reasonable.  It may well be that the Drupal
> solution was considered to be the one best meeting the Au.Gov requirements
> at this point in time at least.
>
> On the question of one choice of Drupal, compared to a one choice of
> Microsoft option, the "one choice situation" for Microsoft also imposed
> technological constraint, being a closed platform. If you were stuck on a
> Sharepoint platform migrating to a different platform would be tough
> option.  But on a Drupal platform its more feasible for example for one to
> write code to for example migrate to CMS-X.
>
> It has to be acknowledge that we do have a very different scenery now
> where the potential for other choices (of CMS) to be considered by the
> AuGov is now more open.  I would not describe the situation now as being a
> lock in to Drupal in the same way as it was a lock in to Microsoft.  Such
> an assertion ignores the fundamental characteristics of Open Source v/s
> Closed source software.  If we allow these to play out in the longer term,
> we should end up with a very different situation.
>
>
> Cheers
> Daniel.
>
>
> In the end, the ultimate test is customer satisfaction.
>
> Bob Birchall
> *CALYX*
>
> On 30/09/14 13:07, Aimee Maree wrote:
>
> It concerns me to think that the government would standardise on a distribution of Drupal... as a CMS aficionado it concerns me that one solution would be chosen and other open source CMS which might be a lot better then other matches are not looked into. Also the concern is updates because it is a proprietary flavour of Drupal it means upgrades like Drupal8 etc will be dependent upon previous next getting the distro and custom modules upgraded etc... We fought for years to get Open Source as an acceptable choice and looked at in tenders and now it seems this objective has gone too far the other way aka removing choice and selection again.
>
>
>
>  On 30 Sep 2014, at 1:02 pm, Daniel J Jitnah <djitnah at greenwareit.com.au> <djitnah at greenwareit.com.au> wrote:
>
> Might be of interest to many who have not seen it before!
>
> http://agov.com.au/about
>
>
> Cheers
> Daniel.
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