Case Study: Verbund - Website Relaunch

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The challenge in this project was to replace the outdated .NET CMS and create a new, modern website that reflects the current state of the art.

The previous infrastructure was complex: VERBUND relied on several servers per environment to operate the platform, meaning that a total of ten servers had to be continuously operated and maintained. This resulted in considerable effort and high costs for maintenance and updates. In addition, most of the extensive system functions were not used in everyday editorial work, which meant that the high license fees were disproportionate to the actual benefits.

By switching to Umbraco Cloud, the effort and costs for maintenance and operation were significantly reduced and the license costs were completely eliminated.

Table of Contents

• Design
• Content Migration
• Workflow and multilingualism
• Test automation, security, and availability
• Conclusion

Design

All pages of the VERBUND world follow a uniform corporate design that complies with WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility guidelines and is regularly audited. Prior to publication, usability was tested with a sample of users from various demographic groups, and the resulting feedback was incorporated.

The VERBUND AG website currently consists of 25 pages and is constantly growing. The flagship of the project is the corporate website verbund.com. It forms the hub from which visitors access all other pages in the VERBUND world, as well as external portals.

• Country pages display content relevant to individual countries, by default in the respective national language.
• Portal pages are subdomains dedicated to specific topics within the Group, such as recruitment, locations, tourism, or art (e.g., power.verbund.com).
• Project pages are the most common. They address individual projects such as the construction of power plants and the renaturation of waterways, or serve to promote campaigns (e.g., powertour.at).
• The event page inspire-summit.com is an exception: It appears in a separate design but is also hosted on the same cloud instance as the corporate pages.

The content placement is consistently modular. VERBUND editors have around 60 different modules at their disposal to display content. The respective page type determines which modules can be used. The full-text search, based on the search provider SOLR, can be used across all pages depending on the configuration.

" By switching to Umbraco Cloud, we have significantly reduced our ongoing hosting and licensing costs – and at the same time gained a platform that we can develop further flexibly and in a future-proof manner. "

Mag. Jasmin Kuric, VERBUND Digital Power GmbH

Content Migration

Although the new site's content was redesigned, selected content such as press releases and financial reports were programmatically migrated from the legacy system to Umbraco. The content was transferred into multiple languages and also contained complex elements such as tables and rich text. The data was exported to a JSON format via PowerShell and then imported into Umbraco using C#.

Workflow and Multilingualism

By using Umbraco Workflow, all content can be reviewed by authorized persons before publication and then approved or rejected.

Content is currently offered in six different languages. The content, which is initially mostly created in German, is translated into the target languages by translation agencies using the Translation Manager.

Test Automation, Security, and Availability

During each deployment, several hundred unit tests are executed to ensure that changes do not cause undesirable side effects. UI tests are run daily on a mirror of the production instance using the Playwright testing framework, simulating users with different devices, operating systems, and browsers.

Both the externally accessible pages and the back office have undergone intensive penetration and load testing. Azure Frontdoor serves as an upstream CDN and provides additional protection against DDoS attacks. Health checks check the availability of the pages every few seconds. Should an instance fail, a backup instance hosted outside of the Umbraco Cloud is activated within seconds.

Conclusion

Due to the switch, ongoing hosting and licensing costs have been reduced to a fraction while maintaining the same level of benefit. Further development is now much more dynamic, and requirements are implemented more quickly. The editors rate the new system as a significant improvement.

To the project!