Review 2020 & Outlook 2021

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic is unlikely to have passed any company without a trace. The Umbraco HQ was no exception to this. It was not able to achieve all of its goals for 2020. We have gathered everything you need to know about the Umbraco successes of 2020 and the ambitious plans the HQ has for 2021.

Although the Umbraco HQ was unable to achieve all of its 2020 goals due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there were many major and minor milestones to celebrate. Like, for instance, the 2000 certified Umbraco developers worldwide. Or the more than 140 companies that are registered Umbraco Gold Partner. Additionally, the new Contributing Gold Partner seal was introduced, with which the Umbraco HQ honoured byte5 and 25 other Umbraco Gold Partners or their tireless, long-term engagement and commitment to the Umbraco community. Umbraco missed its 2020 growth target of 30 percent due to the pandemic, but was still able to end the year on a positive note with a 10 percent growth.

For many years, Umbraco CMS was mostly used in Scandinavia and the United Kingdom. In recent years, the market has expanded. Two new HQ locations were introduced in 2020: the Netherlands and North Carolina, USA. By doing so, the HQ remains true to its mission to be physically as close as possible to the customer and extends its availability to other time zones.

Umbraco Uno, a software-as-a-service solution, was introduced in 2020. With Uno, entire websites can be created and run without ever having to install software or write code. Uno’s strength lies in its speed of setting up new web solutions and its multitude of additional functions. The new SaaS solution makes Umbraco accessible to a wider audience.

The second big innovation of the year was the launch of .NET Core. The alpha version released in September includes the installer and the back office. Umbraco can now also be booted on Linux or Mac, as well. In addition, the HQ team further developed the Heartcore headless system and introduced the popular block list editor with Umbraco 8.7.

“Umbraco is in front of the biggest expansion in its history,” says Umbraco CEO Kim Sneum-Madsen, describing the HQ’s plans for 2021. He says he expects great growth ahead, not only for Umbraco as a software, but also in the community. New locations and increased remote work favour these plans; just as the increased cooperation between HQ and community. The recently published number of active installations shows that the HQ is well on the way to achieving the planned growth: there are over 730,000 active Umbraco installs worldwide.

There are several expected new tech releases in 2021: Umbraco Deploy on Premises enables the use of Umbraco Cloud’s own deployment technology outside of Umbraco Cloud. This simplifies deployment between multiple Umbraco environments. Also, the current trend is to move away from infrastructure-as-a-service towards platform-as-a-service products such as vNext from Microsoft Azure. The Umbraco HQ is planning to release the beta version of .NET Core for Umbraco CMS in March, as well. The official launch of the full version is expected to follow in August 2021.

The ongoing global pandemic makes it impossible to hold any community event, let alone the Codegarden, which is the largest Umbraco community event worldwide – at least not in its original form as a get-together of hundreds of Umbracians from all over the world. This year’s Codegarden will take place online for the first time. This time as a virtual event, Codegarden will be held for the 16th time round on 10 and 11 June 2021. All time zones will be taken into account and joining is free. As usual, the Gold Partner Summit and the Umbraco Award Show including new categories will take place the day before. There will even be the infamous pre-party. The call for speakers for the CG21 is open until 15 March. Despite the restrictions caused by COVID-19, Umbraco enthusiasts can look forward to the popular community event and are sure to experience some surprises, as it is usual for the Umbraco Codegarden.