Squiz

Making .gov.au a work of art

The Art Gallery of NSW creates website masterpieces, painting the final touches with an open source solution from Squiz and a total overhaul of their content management system.

May/June 2007
Angela Priestly, IDM Image & Data Manager

When Brett Whiteley said all people come to a point in their lives where “they must either change or cease,” he had probably never even imagined the potential for the word of his art to be spread across the Internet.

But for the Art Gallery of NSW, the move to 'change or cease' has emerged through the evolution of their web content management system
(CMS) and website. After years of working with Squiz MySource Classic CMS, the Gallery is this year migrating their precious works and information to the next-generation Squiz MySource Matrix CMS.

The best means to pushing exhibitions, advertising what's on offer and highlighting the cultural experience of the Gallery is to advance the users experience online. It's a marketing and communications tool, a place to push promotions and chase donations but more importantly, it's a culturally rich location with its images and information offering site visitors a taste of what they can get out and see.

“Apart from acquiring the collection, there is also the mission of the website,” says Jonathan Cooper, manager of Information/ Website at the Art Gallery of NSW. “It's about exploring and inspiring and giving the chance for people to feel a sort of ownership over the content and an opportunity to contribute.”

The Gallery's relationship with Squiz has a long and rich history.
Before taking up the original MySource offering from the vendor, the Gallery made the most of a free application from a design company looking to spruce up its resume. While the application served the Web needs of the Gallery well during its time, its lack of CMS meant it was up to a third party to make all changes to the site, leaving staff to physically email their requests to the design company and await the turnaround before seeing it live online.

The year was of course 1999, the dot.com boom had been and gone and Web 2.0 was still a few years off rearing its ability to push simple user-generated content. A CMS system was a rarity and by no means, an affordable solution. The Gallery issued a tender, but unaware how much control they could actually have over their website, the originally went looking for another website partner, one who could be more responsive to the changes they required.

“We responded to the tender,” says Steve Barker, executive director at Squiz. “But at the same time, we proposed a rather different solution – a CMS. From there, they were educated on the fact that they could actually control information at their desk through a CMS.”

Squiz had previously been working on a CMS for manufacturing company Tyco under the condition it would involve an open source licence. When the Art Gallery of NSW decided to go with the Squiz solution, the decision paved the way for what would soon become a barrage of government contracts for Squiz over the next seven years.

The Gallery kicked things off with Squiz's initial CMS offering MySource version one, before venturing over to the updated MySource Classic around five years ago. In 2007, it's time to upgrade again and the Gallery is currently in the process of migrating its classic system to Matrix.

For a government department, an open source solution makes sense due to its ability to do away with licensing requirements and allow the freedom of spend on customisation. “An added bonus is that if the company were to fold, then we could actually continue to use it,” says Cooper. “If we were using a piece of software provided by a company holding the rights then there would be this real danger of an intellectual property black hole.”

By saving on licensing fees, the Gallery can instead focus their budgets on having the system tweaked and perfected to meet their own business needs. If the budget is low, the Gallery can instead take advantage of the generic proofs other Squiz clients have already made to their own solutions.

“It means improvements get made to the system, where we didn't actually request them, but we get upgraded and suddenly find we have a new list of features that other clients have requested,” says Cooper.

The Matrix system the Gallery is currently migrating to offers a completely new CMS but continues to follow most of the common methodologies of the Classic system. The fundamentals of the system have changed, with a predominantly page based system overhauled to create an asset based system. Matrix operates out of a database of these assets of stored tagged data so instead of pulling the one page out, the system sends a message to the database to deliver a collection of assets.

The Gallery has recently launched the Brett Whiteley Studio project site as the first of its collection of sites to be migrated and go live on the Matrix system. The site offers users a rich and impressive multimedia experience with most of the work done directly from the Gallery offices. “We didn't want to just migrate and make the website look the same from the front-end,” says Cooper.

But the Whiteley Studio project is just the beginning of the CMS migration process for the Art Gallery of NSW. There's also the Gallery Kids site, the Archibold prize site, Inside Art Express and of course the big one, the Art Gallery of NSW's official site www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au.

Since forming the relationship with the Art Gallery of NSW all those years ago, Squiz has built its solution up to be one of the dominating CMS forces across all levels of government. IDM 

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