Every uNews we send out we generally feature one of our
fantastic Gold Partners and their thoughts on experiencing, using,
and supporting Umbraco. We hope you all enjoy reading the
differing points of view from some of the companies using Umbraco
around the world. This month we asked one of our Danish gold
partners, Kraftvaerk, to tell us a little about why they use
Umbraco. They sent us back a 3 page response! We tried
our hardest to cut it down, but to be honest, most, if not all of
the content was really really good. Particularly their
thoughts on some of the lesser advertised benefits of using Umbraco
within an organisation. So we decided to keep the article in
it's entirety and post it up here on our blog. That way it
doesn't lose any integrity, and members of the community who may
not receive Unews also get the benefit of giving it a read.
We hope you like it as much as we did. On a side note, I also
think a lot of this would be great material for 'Convincing your
Boss'. Enjoy.
Kraftvaerk Aarhus' relationship with Umbraco
Kraftvaerk is a consultancy house with 40 consultants who work
with development and optimization of web portal and e-commerce
solutions. We have recently received an Umbraco Award for best
technical solution, and one of our employees has been nominated an
Umbraco Most Valuable Person.
Kraftvaerk are skilled in a number of .NET-based CMS, such as
Sitecore, SharePoint and Umbraco. Several of our consultants
also have experience with DynamicWeb.
However In 2008, Kraftvaerk Aarhus realized that Umbraco made it
possible for us to deliver more value to our customers. Of course,
the fact that Umbraco is free contributes to this, but we also
discovered other less obvious benefits that we - and our customers
- value highly. Among those are:
Shorter implementation time
Our consultants found that the implementation time was very
short compared to other content management systems, such as
Sitecore. Often, we can save 25-35 % of implementation time. This
leaves us with "free hours" for customization and/or the
possibility of offering better products at a lower price.
Flexibility
Kraftvaerk soon learned that we could develop even complex
websites and e-business solutions much easier than
before. This is due to the very simple structure of
Umbraco. Umbraco's great strength is that it aims to be a
superior CMS, and Umbraco does not fall into the popular trap of
developing each and every web application you can think
of. E.g. many CMS houses want to develop statistic modules,
e-mail modules, e-business modules and other applications into
their CMS. The result is often an inferior module that
complicates the CMS. In most cases, you will be able to find better
and cheaper third party products from specialized producers
anyway.
Customers love Umbraco.
The Umbraco interface is much more intuitive to use than other
CMS. To exemplify, Kraftvaerk consultants usually spend only
1-2 hours to train new Umbraco end users. Our experience with
other CMS is that it usually takes a whole day to educate our
customers to perform the same actions. In the business case of
Økologisk Landsforening (Organic Denmark) we were able to train 2
web editors to educate 20+ internal editors in just 2 hours'
time.
Umbraco community
Kraftvaerk employees find the community around Umbraco
fantastic. We can get answers to Umbraco questions very fast.
Equally important is that the answers often are thorough and
detailed. This is due to a huge commitment and passion among the
many Umbraco professionals.
Our strategic focus
Since Kraftvaerk Aarhus realized that we could deliver
incredible value using the Umbraco CMS, we decided to take a
strategic focus on this platform. We have thus elaborated the
Umbraco platform after a model that we call "umbraco website
framework", internally called UWF.
The idea to develop the Umbraco Website Framework arose when we
could identify many common problems among editors in different
organizations, such as:
- Editors are experiencing greater pressure in the form of
multiple tasks, tighter deadlines, distribution to multiple
platforms and demands for faster time-to-market for new
functionality and content.
- Many editors find that dependency on a web agency and the
limitations of their existing CMS prevent rapid time-to-market of
new ideas.
- Most editors feel the need to distribute content to a number of
different platforms (website, campaign sites, facebook, mobile
devices ecc.). In this context, it is very time consuming and
inefficient to create the same content for different
platforms.
The philosophy behind our UWF is to solve the above challenges
on behalf of customers. UWF therefore ensures:
- Maximum and easy reuse of content across portals and other
platforms.
- Editors can solve complicated tasks and design changes on their
own, without involving the web agency.
- Integration to Facebook, Twitter, popular email systems with
the purpose of having a single point for content creation and then
distributing from Umbraco to the desired platforms.
Customers have embraced the Umbraco Website Framework and
Kraftvaerk's Umbraco focus. Among Kraftvaerk references, you
find:
Furthermore, we are very pleased that many of the best skilled
Umbraco consultants today wish to work at our Aarhus
office.
Interested in more Kraftvaerk stuff?
Kraftvaerk's Umbraco site: www.nytcms.dk (in danish)
Kim Andersens blog: www.kim-andersen.dk (in
danish)
Kraftvaerk's partner profile: /certified-partners/browse-solution-providers/kraftvaerk