Question Period Note: WEB SITE CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM MIGRATION Web project

• On Friday April 5, Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) moved part of its external website (veterans.gc.ca) to a new information technology platform.

• This is a first phase in a process to move all of VAC’S website content to a more modern and secure, content management system (CMS).

• The previous software was no longer supported, putting the Department at increased risk of IT instability, as well as cyber vulnerabilities.

• This phase of the migration has been a realization of 2 years of effort.

• There have been some issues with sections of the website that have moved or were not accessible as well links that did not work. We are working as quickly as possible to resolve these issues. We appreciate your patience.

N/A

WHEN PRESSED:

Q1 – What is CMS and why is VAC switching to it?

A new Content Management System will allow the department to introduce a recognized, well supported system for managing its internet presence. The system is government centric, follows best practices and allows for collaborative development and information sharing. This system presents many advantages over our past platform allowing easier editing, better control, and significant increases in security.

Q2 – Was this change necessary?

Yes, continued use of the current system places VAC in the position of running an unsupported system, which carry’s significant IT risk. Continued use increases the probability of security issues, vulnerabilities and a potential for instability of web environments.

Q3 – Do other Government of Canada departments use this program?

Yes, our CMS is currently being used in other areas of the Government of Canada. For example, Statistics Canada, Shared Services Canada, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, as well as several other departments and agencies in the Government of Canada are on a similar platform. Additionally, this platform has recently been adopted within the VAC portfolio at both VRAB and Office of the Veterans Ombud.

The CMS conforms to GC digital standards and is a common platform on GC websites that, like VAC, are hosted outside of the Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) platform of Canada.ca.

Q4 – How was this project resourced?

The project was a departmental led project and funded from VAC’s existing budgets. Salary budget covered the requirements for internal Leads in the area of IT and Communications as well as IT developers. Non-Salary budgets covered contractors with the necessary technical expertise, such as a Web Architect and a Web Developer with Drupal expertise as well as an IT Analyst with Automated Testing and Data Validation Expertise. Contractors were sourced from a single task based contract for IT professional services, a contract that provides VAC the ability to very quickly bring in skilled IT resources via a Task Authorization against the contract to augment capacity for projects or initiatives as and when needed.
If pressed further, the total project cost was $2.1M over 2 years.

Q5 – What types of issues were encountered upon release?

Upon release, VAC encountered issues with some sections of the website not being accessible, as well as a number of links being broken, and some website stability concerns. The stability issues were fixed within the few days. Content issues were tackled on a priority basis, and we continue to fix some of the lower priority sections at this time. We have seen significant decreases in visitors accessing broken internet links since release as we correct the issues.