Zone’s technology director, Adam Jenkin, shares his key takeaways from Umbraco’s Codegarden 2019…
Last month Zone technical architect Peter Bridger and I attended Codegarden, the annual Umbraco developer conference, in Odense, Denmark. We were first-timers, but it quickly became apparent that the makers of “the most friendly CMS” are also the organisers of “the most friendly conferences”. Having been to many tech conferences, the passion and dedication of this open source community clearly stood out, and it was humbling to meet the people who have worked so hard to take the platform from strength to strength.
Our main takeaway was that Umbraco is now operating as a serious, mature software company, and its next step is to broaden its horizons and market itself beyond the development community. With more than 500,000 installations, the next phase of growth comes from moving beyond the tech community and being recognised as a credible platform by marketers, C-suite stakeholders and advisories like Forrester and Gartner.
The opening keynote kicked off with a customer case study from Stark Group, the largest retailer and distributor of building materials in the Nordics. Stark is using Umbraco and Struct PIM to manage more than 100,000 products on 900 of their webshops. Claus Agerschou, the group’s head of PIM, explained that Stark was in need of an agile solution capable of tackling the unknown demands of tomorrow. With Umbraco and Struct PIM, they “went from long-term frustrations to happiness in a short amount of time”, achieving significant business transformation within the first 100 days of the project.
Demonstration of value to customers and clients continued through the conference. Jeppe Basse and Vigga Svensson gave an inspiring talk on how they are using Umbraco to build “circular commerce solutions” that power online rental services for fashion and clothing. For Rent The Look, by Malene Birger, Umbraco has been used to provide customers with an intuitive experience to browse, rent and return loaned items. For the business, the platform provides the essential automated management of products, stock, fulfilment and returns. The recent Umbraco architecture changes are now coming to fruition and enabling the power of the platform to be harnessed to build products which are capable of fulfilling large-scale, complex business and data requirements.
One of the key factors to growth is Umbraco’s cloud service. This is a significant revenue stream for Umbraco and the efforts of the 50-strong HQ team are split 50/50 between its cloud offering and the core CMS product. Anders Trans Sørensen and Jacob Midtgaard-Olesen from Umbraco brilliantly brought to life how Umbraco Cloud is enabling businesses to be more digitally self-sufficient. With the Baselines service, Umbraco allows business users to create new websites from a ‘baseline’, without the need for an IT department or developer assistance. This technology has allowed clients such as Coop to launch new campaign websites in under 48 hours and is enabling TCGPlayer to run thousands of websites on the cloud platform.
Lastly, Content Apps is a new feature that enables the HQ team to focus on the core product and allows community and software vendors to build apps that integrate as first-class citizens in the platform. Part of Umbraco’s success is driven by the marketplace of packages that developers use to rapidly build solutions. Content Apps takes this to the next level, providing a premium mechanism for editor specific add-ons which seamlessly integrate into the Umbraco back-office system. The featured PIM and commerce solutions are built as content apps and truly show the integration capabilities and potential of what can be achieved.
What was once a conference primarily for developers is now aimed at a much broader and diverse audience. This is really encouraging and I believe that by putting clients in the spotlight, demonstrating success and putting customers and business needs at the heart of the platform, Umbraco is on track to achieve its goals.
The next 12 months will be an exciting time for those who are already part of the Umbraco community, but more importantly, an exciting time for new organisations that may not have heard of Umbraco, or fully understood its capabilities. The future looks bright for this great open source platform.
