Over the past period, we have often talked about our plans for our own CMS. After careful consideration, we decided to change this course and instead fully focus on the proven Umbraco platform. In this message, we explain what this means for you, what the process looks like and what you can expect from us.
Continuity via Umbraco, upgrade to version 13 We are continuing our development on the proven Umbraco CMS platform. Our development team has already started preparations for an upgrade from version 7 to Umbraco 13, allowing us to provide one standardized and future-proof solution for all our 65+ customers. For your content managers, the technology remains familiar and it is expected that no additional training is required to continue working in the well-known Umbraco CMS backend. What the upgrade gives you immediately This upgrade is more than just technical maintenance. It provides a modern, stable basis and immediately brings a series of important improvements:
- Secure and up to date platform: The upgrade ensures that your portal is completely up to date in terms of both security and web techniques, which forms a stable basis for further development.
- Improved user experience: We're optimizing the mobile and tablet experience and taking the final steps to fully comply with WCAG accessibility guidelines.
- Increased safety: We're adding accelerated Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) as a login option.
- Functional extensions: We will immediately include improvements such as a completely rewritten project module with in-depth filtering options, more attention to multilingualism and improvements to our Self-Service Scenarios (SSs).
Our planning: the way to upgrade In the run-up to going live, we are going through a careful preparation process. We expect the first portals from November to be able to migrate, with the aim of transferring most customer environments early next year. Phase 1: Preparation (July — August — September) In this phase, we lay the foundation for the upgrade. For some points, we will contact you personally.
- Technical optimization: We're moving all media files to Azure Blob Storage for a faster and more stable website.
o Action: If this requires an addendum to the processing agreement, your account manager will contact you about this.
- Switch to SSSs: We are permanently phasing out Umbraco Forms and supervising the transition to the more modern Self-Service Scenarios.
o Action: If this applies to you, a consultant will contact you to make this process run smoothly.
- Major cleaning: We're cleaning up the current environments to remove obsolete content.
o Action: Where necessary, our Team Updates will contact you to clean up the content together. Phase 2: Testing and Deployment (October — November) In this phase, we ensure that the actual upgrade can go smoothly through an extensive and repeated testing process, until we have 100% confidence in a perfect migration.
- Comprehensive automated testing: We perform full test migrations on copies of the environment. In addition to visual regression tests, we also automatically scan the entire site to ensure that all content has been transferred completely and correctly.
- Manual control by us: After all automated tests are successful, our team performs a thorough manual check as an additional quality check. We repeat this whole process until it is perfect.
- Seamless go-live: Only when we are 100% satisfied will we adjust the binding to the website and from that moment on you will work in a new environment based on Umbraco 13. This ensures a go live with zero downtime.
Looking to the future: your wishes and our roadmap After the upgrade, we will accelerate the further development of the platform. We are aware of existing wishes and will update them after the updates and prioritize them together with you. Some concrete improvements that are already on the roadmap:
- Improvement of the widget framework within Umbraco with more freedom for styling options and new content types.
- Improvements to the customer portal where we will gradually introduce new concepts from the Suite-based portal within Umbraco, including improved screens for, among other things, contract information and downloading rental specifications, optimizations to the repair request process and self-service scenarios, attachments to news reports, and also the improved personal inbox concept.
- Integration with OAuth and OpenID connect, co-browsing capabilities, and integration with AI tools to streamline the process of personal contact with tenants.
We are convinced that this change of direction leads to a more stable platform, faster innovation and more value for your organization.
