The latest Danish invasion.

Every national event doesn’t have to be in London does it? Not that there’s anything wrong with London, it’s a great city of course, but it’s hellishly expensive to get there - assuming your train actually turn up - and it’s hellishly expensive when you actually get there. So it was a welcome change when Umbraco announced that the 2025 Business Partner Summit was to be held in Manchester, especially for those of us based ‘up North’.

 

 

Even more conveniently, the venue was The National Football Museum which is but a corner kick away from Victoria train station, and those lovely chaps from Umbraco had a arranged a free pre-event mooch around the museum for delegates, which is worth going back to for a longer look. Another corner kick away from the Museum is the The Corn Exchange, home to the Cozy Club where there was pre-drinks, an excellent lunch and a chance to catch up with friends before heading back to the venue which had been fully ‘umbracified’ and made for an impressive backdrop.

The intensive afternoon sessions were comprised of the usual mix of presentations and Q&As from the leadership team - CEO and wannabe stand up comedian Mats Persson, CTO Filip Bruun Bech-Larsen, Head of Brand & Content Strategy Nina Kaad Gade, Director of Developer Relations Emma Burstow, and the newly promoted UK Partner Manager Frederik Klerens. These were interspersed with video based case studies and some ad hoc contributors from the floor, which was full of familiar faces from the Umbraco Community.

 

 

The key takeaways? 

Version 17
The event was held exactly three weeks before the launch of V17, the latest Long Term Support version so a major release which includes enhancements to search and the ability to use plugins such as elastic; load balancing for both front-end and back-end; reusable content blocks and improved commerce. The upgrade path, which follows Microsoft’s .Net cadence, is continuous with 2 releases a year and an LTS version every 2 years, which it’s advisable to follow so that it’s an incremental process rather than a potential near rebuild if left too long, although some version changes are significant such as V8 onwards. In an open discussion one agency owner explained that they built in an allocation of 2 weeks a year to cover upgrades which seemed liek a good policy.

Umbraco Cloud
Alongside these additions to the CMS, Umbraco have also introduced a range of new features to the Umbraco Cloud platform including Bring Your own Login [e.g. Google], Load Balancing and more predictability around usage and billing. 

Umbraco Engage
This add on, which does have a licence cost, brings intelligent user experiences, personalisation, optimisation, split testing and segmentation to rival big ticket platforms like Optimizely and Adobe Experience. 

Ai [inevitably]
It seems like everyone is talking about Ai and CTO Filip had to address the topic. Whilst Umbraco isn’t developing it’s own Ai, the flexibility and open nature of Umrbaco makes it easy to integrate best of breed agents and the increasing number available in Umbraco’s Marketplace. He showed an example of using Claude in the back-end to run reports within Umbraco, which could save a lot of time and is not necessarily an obvious use of the tech as thoughts tend to focus on front-end features?

Umbraco Compose
This was the headliner and one that Filip was clearly most excited about, although there’s no definitive launch date other than 2026. ‘Composable’ is the accepted modern approach to enterprise level IT infrastructures in which different applications for specific purposes are integrated using APIs. Compose will make this easier by providing a single ‘engine’ in the middle so that systems such as a CMS [or multiple CMS’s], PIM systems, ERP, CRM and Commerce systems can link and ‘talk’ to multiple front-ends, such as a website [or multiple sites], Apps, In-store and Social Media to build Omnichannel platforms with further links to extensions, such as search, using Webhooks.

Enterprise
The growth of Umbraco has seen it become increasingly adopted across all sizes of organisations, including Enterprise. In fact, and you might be surprised to know, that within the FTSE 100 it’s now second only to Optimizely and above Adobe Experience Manager. These platforms, in contrast to Umbraco which is Open Source, have chunky licence fees - Optimizely is a minimum 360k annually and Adobe will be well into 6 figures. Whilst you’d have thought that being free is a good thing, it’s sometimes creates credibility questions when it come to Enterprise ‘... if it’s free it can’t be any good...’ So Umbraco have decided to package up the CMS and all its add ons, such as Engage, along with Cloud hosting into to a £66k per annum so that it’s more directly comparable to these proprietary systems, but with all the advantages of Open Source.

Partners
There was lots of content on the day specific to partners and of increasing the support Umbraco provides from HQ. A new partner portal is due early this year with loads of marketing resources including slide decks, surveys/rankings/data, badges, battlecards and so on. This is added to by ‘boots on the ground’ and in the UK there’s now a team of 3 - Fred, Aaron and Jake - to help us, our clients and prospects. They’re very keen to join agencies in client meetings to present the benefits of Umbraco and to dem new products, such as Engage, which brings their expertise to add to ours.

 

 

After Party
Umbraco are always very hospitable, so as well as the excellent lunch, there was an after party at Sixes, an indoor cricket social gaming venue also in the adjacent Corn Exchange with shortened caged wickets, a bowling machine and targets to try and build a score. Fortunately there was also a big buffet and a free bar.

Footnote
A nice little aside on the day was bumping into Dave Houghton, a former Ui dev at bd2 who moved on around 10 years ago. It was lovely to catch up with Dave, who's a lovely bloke, and hear that he’s still restoring his MR2 and is still obsessed with his cats. He took the trouble to drop us an email the next day, which was also lovely:

Hi Will,

It was such a nice surprise running into you at the conference yesterday! Next time we’ll have to catch up properly — I had to jet off a bit too quickly.

It really reminded me how much I appreciated the time and support you gave me back when we worked together. I genuinely wouldn’t be where I am now without the opportunities and encouragement I had from you and the team.

Hope everything’s going well at your end, and hopefully our paths cross again soon. Pass my hellos on to Bryony too!

All the best,
Dave