What Ektron Users Need to Know About Umbraco Cloud

While Ektron has not announced a specific sunset date, CMS platform improvements for Ektron are sparse. This is leading many Ektron customers to evaluate and compare potential platforms to migrate their website to, from Ektron. With enterprise website platform costs on the rise, many legacy Ektron customers find the acquisition and implementation of a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is out of reach. This leaves them looking for a strong and secure platform that supports integration, scalability, and optimal editing experience. The Umbraco Cloud platform stands apart from other CMS options in a variety of ways.

Umbraco Cloud is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). This means the software platform includes hosting, licensing, and security patching all rolled into a single, affordable monthly package. This allows marketers to focus on elevating their customers’ digital experience without worrying about software upgrades. Additionally, Umbraco Cloud excels in the following areas: 

• Reduced Time-to-Market 
• Intuitive Editing Experience 
• Simplified Maintenance and Security 
• Scalable ROI
  
  

Reduced Time-To-Market

In an ever-changing digital landscape, speed is everything. Many organizations, such as manufacturers, universities, and hospitals, have limited timeframes and budgets for migration projects. The amount of time to implement and launch a website can make a significant difference when measuring the success or failure of a website project. The Umbraco Cloud platform makes it easy to accelerate this process – reducing the time to complete the project, as well as the overall project budget. For example, we recently migrated a client to Umbraco Cloud which reduced the time and investment needed to deploy their 30+ websites by over 170%. This gave our client the ability and agility to offer more value to their customers at a pace not previously possible.

Intuitive Editing Experience 

One of the most commonly overlooked items, when organizations evaluate website platforms, is the overall editing experience. Too often, organizations invest in advanced software capabilities they rarely use instead of focusing on the features they need to use every day. When a website is difficult to edit, it often gets neglected - negatively affecting its performance from an SEO and digital experience perspective. When Umbraco released its intuitive editing experience as part of the version 8 Cloud platform, it was clear that they take the website editing experience seriously. They streamlined the use of the most common features including: 

• The editor 
• Multi-device previews 
• Content approvals 
• Content versioning 
• Scheduled publishing 
• Multilingual content management  
• Recycle bins 
• Page layouts 

The result is a platform that is easy to learn. This accelerates the website migration process and sets the foundation for long-term website management success. 
 

Simplified Maintenance and Security 

No one likes spending resources on website platform maintenance and security as it rarely brings evident ROI to an organization’s digital strategy. Complex and expensive CMS upgrades disincentivize organizations from keeping websites up to date. As a result, organizations fall behind in maintaining the website platforms themselves. This usually results in a dilemma where an organization is forced to choose between investing to upgrade the existing CMS platform or migrating platforms. Neither decision brings immediate value to an organization’s customer base nor ROI to the bottom line. Umbraco Cloud takes a different approach to simplify this process. As a PaaS-based CMS, Umbraco Cloud includes automatic security upgrades as part of its offering. This ensures your website is always up to date from a security perspective, allowing your marketing team to focus on attracting and delighting customers. More importantly, if an organization migrates CMS platforms because their existing platform is outdated, migrating to a platform that prevents the same situation from occurring in the future makes sense. 
 

ROI at Scale  

Whether your marketing team consists of one person or hundreds, the Umbraco Cloud platform keeps the focus on execution and not on platform maintenance. As an organization matures in digital agility, it will inevitably require different tools and tactics to achieve its overall goals. Umbraco sets a foundation for this growth by enabling hundreds of certified platform add-ons which can be integrated when the time is right. With Umbraco Cloud, you only pay for tools and features when you need them - not before. This focus on bottom-line ROI for organizations of all sizes sets the foundation for a scalable digital strategy. 
 

Migrating from Ektron to Umbraco Cloud 

Platform migrations can seem complex and daunting, but they don’t have to be. Our job is to cut through the complexities that make these projects expensive and scary. We partnered with hundreds of clients to simplify and migrate from dozens of CMS platforms, including Ektron. With a variety of accelerator tools that remove a majority of the guesswork, we complete these projects in a fraction of the time and budget of traditional migrations. 

If you are struggling to get the most out of your website or your website cannot achieve your goals, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We are happy to talk about the tactics we can use to accelerate your success.