“Migration of internal DMS and portal to GoFAST”
At the end of 2019, the French Police Academy, which is part of the Central Directorate for Recruitment and Training of the National Police (DCRFPN), began considering replacing its internal DMS and the associated portal used to distribute all field procedures and training documents for the National Police.
The challenge: to replace this platform, developed in-house some fifteen years ago, with a commercially available platform, preferably open-source with limited specific developments. The new solution had to be ‘on-premise’ and connected to the Interministerial State Network (RIE) so that it could also be accessed by the Gendarmerie and Customs and run on NEO 2 smartphones.
The solution: GoFAST GED was chosen by the French Police Academy because it perfectly matched what they were looking for, as GoFAST is open-source on a very powerful DMS functional basis, requiring only additional developments.
The main specifications have been defined:
- Development of job descriptions with metadata and specific management rules.
- Concepts of publication status on the portal and approval workflow.
- Implementation of an advanced search engine based on metadata.
- Intranet portal for field agents to consult job descriptions.
- Complete migration of files and documents with recovery of existing metadata.
- On-premise installation and security certification in the Ministry of the Interior's data centre.
- Involvement of key users of the system to be replaced in the project.
Despite fairly precise specifications, the aim was to have an agile project and to remain as close as possible to the ‘GoFAST’ standard.
At the end of 2022, the French National Police assessed GoFAST's ability to replace its internal DMS via a Proof of Concept.
PoC phase (approx. 10 reference users):
- Specific metadata for a category of files (Practical Files).
- Development of the advanced search engine.
- Testing the migration of standard files.
PoC assessment: GoFAST confirmed its ability to meet business needs, offering a robust and customised solution.
‘CEO-Vision was able to deliver a tailor-made version of GoFAST, perfectly suited to our operational requirements.’
Once the PoC was completed, the steps were as follows:
- Iterative development over 18 months with regular validations in an integration environment (SaaS).
- CEO-Vision was commissioned to take over and maintain the Portal section with its scalability challenges.
- Installation in the SGAMI (General Secretariat for the Administration of the Ministry of the Interior) data centre in Lyon.
- Migration of files and documents and integrity checks.
- General acceptance testing followed by activation of the service at national level.
Business adaptation: specific data sheets and metadata meeting operational needs.
Successful migration: service continuity and optimised access for field agents.
Reliability: robust and secure platform, hosted on-premises.
Strategic choice: reasonable adaptation of a standard GoFAST solution, enabling optimisation of development and operating costs.