Umbraco

I learned about Umbraco in 2011 when I studied in Denmark. Umbraco was founded by a brilliant tech enthusiast, based around a great vision and a strong community. I do not know Niels personally, but have followed him as a professional. He has impressed me with his strong leadership values, involvement in the community and collaboration. I have noticed that Umbraco has strong values which I believe comes from Niels leadership and vision for Umbraco. 

Ucommerce

I got a job at Ucommerce, which is an e-commerce software for Umbraco (and many other CMS as of today). My job was to create leads for the sales team, which consisted one the CEO and COO. We were a small team, and it was great fun!

The first assignment was to generate interest for the Ucommerce booth at an Umbraco conference in the UK later that month. Almost everyone I called was so friendly and would love to drop by. What an easy job! 

We wanted to show off Ucommerce to every company working with Umbraco, so I started to find these companies, and reach out to them. The idea was to invite them to a demo, and get a conversation started. Usually they were impressed because Søren - the Ucommerce co-founder - is such a brilliant E-commerce specialist. There is more to it, but the demo strategy was pretty successful, and soon we grew the phoner team to five student workers. 

All of this because Umbraco is available and a great tool - and with Ucommerce it would become a competitive CMS in the e-commerce world, since it enabled companies to make webshops with Umbraco.

Umbraco is a CMS. You might know about WordPress which is the world's most popular CMS, since everyone can learn to use it. Umbraco is different. It is based on a different technology, and you need to have programming skills to make an app or website. You can call it a framework, because it gives you the frame for building, but you can manipulate this frame and take advantage of some of the built-in tools.

Perhaps this analogy can explain the difference

WordPress solutions are the prefabricated standard house that looks like all other houses in the neighbourhood. You can use many standard tools in the 'Ikea shop' of CMS, and make the changes to your house by yourself.

Umbraco solutions are created by architects and designers to make it a unique house. You need an architect to make changes.

Built to last

An Umbraco solution is built to last. If the project has been approached right from scratch, you can keep developing your Umbraco solution instead of spending time on fixing bugs and errors. That is because everything is custom coded by the same people, and that the project has been built to grow (that is what Umbraco really can do). Many Umbraco end-users choose Umbraco, because they have bad experience with the CMS that depends on click-and-install plugins. If you install 30 third-party plugins on your solution, problems are bound to happen. They are developed by 30 different companies, and the many features of each plugin will create messy code, and 'mess with each other'.

Try to have 30 off-brand mechanichs working with different parts of your car, and I'm sure there will be a fight in the garage within 10 mins., and your car will be a mess when they are 'done' (they never will be to tell you the truth). Or you can drive your car to the cusom solution garage, and get a higher price from the specialized mechanic who will oversee and quality assure the whole project by himself.

The community surrounding Umbraco was very including, geeky and friendly. You can truly talk about a community, where companies and people contribute to a community where their competitors can reap the benfits of their knowledge and work. It's very clever and it was pioneered by some of the leading people at and surrounding Umbraco.

At Ucommerce all of our customers were competitors. Regarding customers, but also about recruiting talents. But every time we had an event or training, these guys just wanted to learn and share knowledge and experience, and help each other out, while having a good time. When you have that kind of mentality in a community, it's just great. People can also contribute with their ideas, projects and code to the community, and can expect to get valuable feedback and ideas in return.

The smart companies send their best and most passionate people to these events, together with some up-and-coming juniors, and make sure to gather feedback and adjust their company and strategy to enable them to recruit the best talents - which are now a part of their network. Even better, they encourage their employees to contribute and share knowledge, to let their people show if their great ideas and business implementations.

I believe that it is investment worth the time and effort, which in return will give you happier and more dedicated employees.

Umbraco is for those who need something special. Someone who wants the software to adapt to their ideas and workflows, and not vice versa. Usually also someone who has tried the cheaper solutions with the added stress, expenses and focus elsewhere than growing the business.

You can strcture the backend quite a lot, and it can be a strong base and foundation for complex web systems. One of the KSP in my opition is that you can optimize your workflows with the help of Umbraco, and that new features can be added when needed. Umbraco is not only built to last, but also built to grow.

Umbraco is a great system to manage content, and it does it well across devices. There are endless integration possibilities with Umbraco, and it makes it a great system for the medium-large business segment.