Livingdocs the headless CMS

Kunde

Direktion für Entwicklung und Zusammenarbeit DEZA DEZA

Produktion

Migration, set-up & support Hynek Bures
2023/4

The Swiss Federal Administration is migrating its public web presence to a new web application. In the past, its websites were based on Microsoft Sharepoint. For the last 2 years, the administration has been migrating to the headless CMS application Livingdocs. As a technical consultant, I had the opportunity to support SDC’s thematic networks in their migration process to the new standard service. The migration steps included

• Content consolidation: Before moving to a new platform, the content on the current platform was evaluated: What is outdated? How can we maintain a leaner site structure?
• Creation of a new site structure on Livingdocs.
• Content management: Probably the only way to keep the content on Livingdocs organised is to implement a clear tagging concept.
• Designing the page layout according to the federal government’s web concept.
• Actual migration of content to Livingdocs.
• Testing and providing feedback to the IT department for further development of the application.
• Training SDC staff in the use of the new web platform.

As a result of the successful migration, Helvetas, BFH-HAFL and I were awarded the mandate to support the SDC networks in operating their Livingdocs platforms from 2025 to 2028.

Takeaway 1: Tag system

Compared to the previous Sharepoint solution, Livingdocs is a much easier way to create content on the web. It is easy enough for government employees to create content themselves. Which makes sense, as they are the ones who know the subject best. Where Livingdocs is limited is in its ability to manage and organise content. The version implemented within the Federal Administration only allows for two levels of tags: Tags grouped into root tags. This has its limits when working with thousands of documents.

Takeaway 2: Front-end editing

You can create specific groups of documents on a page: All documents of an event are grouped on the event page. Now, if you want to edit or change one of the event documents, you have to find it in the backend. This tedious workaround could easily be avoided if administrators could access the document’s backend data by clicking directly on the document in the frontend.