(Left to right: Kevin Jump, Dale Shepherd, Tim Saunders, Chris Jones and Matt Watson)
Yesterday afternoon (22nd August 2013) saw the incredibly successful first "Umbraco in Local Government" event take place here at the Shirehall.
The "mini-conference" brought people together from public sector and local government backgrounds from across the UK to listen to a few short presentations about Umbraco, and provided an opportunity for an informal networking session too.
We also used the #umbLocalGov Twitter hashtag to allow conversations to happen during the event between attendees and those who were unable to make it in person.
After a quick intro from Chris Jones, and a whistle-stop review of Shropshire Council's journey with Umbraco from me, we were very grateful to have some excellent speakers in the forms of Kevin Jump (formerly of Liverpool Direct Ltd, now Digital Overlord at Jumoo), Matt Watson (Barnsley Council) and Tim Saunders (The Cogworks) to raise the bar.
Kevin was able to provide us with some interesting insights into project managing the migration of Liverpool City Council's website from their old CMS to Umbraco, detailing the tools and staff resources they used to plan and deliver the project. It was worth noting that their development processes and general experiences were not too dissimilar from our work on new.shropshire.gov.uk and the shropshire.gov.uk migration projects. One of the key points (for me) was their "Done" box, which contained a selection of goodies to be given out when key parts of their project were complete, which is a pretty good motivational tool *stares in the direction of Chris hopefully*.
Kevin also talked about what they have given back to the community, in the forms of uSync (one of the tools they developed to manage development and source control) and the uLocalGov Starter Kit (a cut-down version of the Liverpool City Council site structure & templates).
Matt talked about the integration of a CRM (and other web services) into their website, and pointed out again that the nature of Umbraco doesn't get in the way of getting things done. All the services and processing can be handled by using standard .NET features, leaving Umbraco free to just display whatever content you give it.
There was plenty of interest around the room in sharing the various APIs and code resources that Barnsley Council uses to do this, and potentially collaborating on extending these to cover other third-party applications being used by other councils.
Tim showed us the future of Umbraco, demoing the upcoming version 7 (codenamed "Belle") with it's brand new clean and minimal editor interface, as well as the new Umbraco as a Service cloud-hosted platform and revamped Umbraco.tv training resource.
The entire back-end UI of Umbraco 7 has been planned out to concentrate on giving the editors the tools to maintain their content, without inundating their screen with menus and buttons. The development team are trying to keep any breaking changes to a minimum, so those using a current version of Umbraco 6 will be able to upgrade easily and allow their editors to have the benefit of the new interface. The downside to this is that it will only run on the latest versions of browsers (IE10, Firefox, Chrome, Safari), which, because of the ageing equipment found in councils, most staff won't have.
The "Umbraco as a Service" project was also of interest to the audience, as this would allow councils to build and maintain their websites on virtual Umbraco instances, hosted in the cloud. Not only would this save money in terms of infrastructure costs, but also in maintenance and development time & effort too, as the interface will give you a simple way of maintaining and deploying any changes to your development/staging/live environments.
After the speakers had concluded, the floor was given over to an informal networking session. This allowed us all to chat a bit more about what we were all up to, compare notes and figure out opportunities for us all to share or develop solutions for common needs.
There was one thing we all agreed on - this should be the first of many #umbLocalGov events to take place around the UK. Several people who attended on the day were willing to arrange and host the next event, so we will post any details as soon as we hear about them.
So, huge thanks again to all that made it, to the excellent speakers, Kevin, Matt & Tim, and to our own Jane Torrens for getting everything booked & organised!
Our presentations:
- "Shropshire Council & Umbraco" - Dale Shepherd, Shropshire Council (view the slide notes for more background information)
- "Umbracopool.gov.uk - Project delivery and other animals" - Kevin Jump, Jumoo
- "Integrating CRMs" - Matt Watson, Barnsley Council
- "The future of Umbraco" - Tim Saunders, The Cogworks
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