Victoria’s legislation website — migration to SDP

Office of the Chief Parliamentary Counsel’s (OCPC) challenge

Legislation.vic.gov.au was running on outdated proprietary software, Lotus Notes. The site wasn’t user-friendly, wasn’t responsive on mobile and had a number of other limitations.

OCPC’s transformation

Following a detailed user-centred design process conducted by Victoria’s Department of Premier and Cabinet (DPC), Salsa worked with DPC to create the highly customised site on Victoria’s SDP (see What is SDP? for more information). The large and complex migration was executed using Salsa’s open source migration tool, Merlin.

The outcomes

• Greater transparency and access to laws considered and passed by Parliament

• Decommissioning of a legacy, proprietary, end-of-life content management system (CMS)

• A new site on Victoria’s whole-of-government digital platform, SDP

• Faster migration at a reduced cost with Salsa’s migration tool Merlin

“Salsa was able to onboard quickly to the project and immediately add value with their expertise in large content migrations. Working with data that was in part upto 20 years old, meant there were many edge cases and migration challenges along the way. Automation meant these were able to be quickly identified and mitigated. The new website went live with no legacy data issues, and our users couldn't have been happier with the improved service.”

Amber Benjafield, Senior Project and Engagement Manager, DPC

OCPC’s challenge — complex site and outdated CMS

Legislation.vic.gov.au was running on outdated proprietary software, Lotus Notes. The site wasn’t user-friendly, wasn’t responsive on mobile and had a number of other limitations that had been ‘worked around’ for years. In general, the site was difficult to manage, difficult to support and very difficult to use for citizens.

Victoria’s SDP was chosen as the new platform. With complex formatting and templates across different legislation types (Acts, Statutory Rules and Bills) OCPC needed a vendor that could pick up the project requirements quickly and run with it.

OCPC’s transformation — customised site with easy migration

OCPC started with a thorough design process, focusing on human-centered design led by DPC.You can find out about this process in the Medium blog written by DPC’s designer, Duncan Legge.

The project then moved into technical discovery. With part of this process already done by DPC’s business analyst, Salsa took the functional specification and translated it into JIRA tickets and sprints as part of our standard agile process.

Salsa worked closely with DPC’s frontend developer to create a new content format/presentation in Victoria’s Single Digital Presence. The site is a highly customised instance of Single Digital Presence, requiring new structures to accommodate the different types of content in terms of both formatting and the content’s lifecycle. This involved customising the backend, creating new content structures and customising or creating new frontend components to handle the level of detail needed to display the data in a structured way.

Some of these components will be contributed back to Ripple, Single Digital Presence’s frontend design system. For example, a complex listing page was created with multiple rows and multiple columns to capture the necessary information of Acts, Statutory Rules and Bills.

In terms of the migration process itself, this was also a large and complex migration with over 11,000 complex records pages migrated and over 88,000 documents migrated. Despite complex content formats and types, Salsa was able to automate the migration using Salsa’s migration tool, Merlin. Merlin scrapes the content and data and transforms it into structured content/data on the target platform. However, we needed to create lots of migration rules to cover all the different situations and types of content. While setting up Merlin was complex and time-consuming, without this automation tool the migration would have been even more complex, much more time-consuming, and therefore much more costly.

The outcomes — improved website on SDP

Some of the benefits for site users and the OCPC include:

• Legislation.vic.gov.au is now responsive to mobile — this is very important because it allows one of the main user groups, lawyers, to access the site from their phones when in court

• More user-friendly site for visitors

• Clearer listing pages for users

• Improved site functionality and new site features

• More user-friendly experience for content editors, who can now manage content on a modern content management system (CMS)

• Moving from outdated proprietary software to a cutting-edge, fully open source platform

• Access to the many benefits of Victoria's whole-of-government digital platform, Single Digital Presence, including extensive support, user-tested components, and a growing community

About OCPC

The Office of the Chief Parliamentary Counsel (OCPC) is responsible for drafting and amending Victorian legislation. The OCPC is part of the Department of Premier and Cabinet (DPC).