I am currently at the stage of trying to choose CMS for new app. It is even supposed to be not a web site, but kind of web-based intranet system since it should be available only within the company.
The main goal is to manage Clients of the company and everything else related to various business and linkages with those clients. Important thing is that the app should be used and filled in with data by all staff.
If it would be Umbraco, obviously I have to decide on the following:
Can I use Members as a tool for tracking Clients? Most probably structure and logic will be much more complicated than Members. Therefore if it would be Members as a basis then I need to add more functionality in it.
Or... should I use node for this? Do you think that using Umbraco document type and its node would be a good idea for management of clients whose number will be continuously growing maybe up to 5,000 - 10,000?
I like that Umbraco offers already existing tool for staff (either as Umbraco users or members) so that they can work in BackOffice doing all the job. But I am a little in doubt that backoffice is a right place to develop all the logic and the whole scenarios... For example, what if it would be needed to customize somehow the back-end part (backoffice) – for doing search, custom views, reports and different relations of client node with many other nodes, categories, etc.
Is it possible to edit nodes in own code (not using the backoffice)?
Any your advice, ideas and answers will be very much appreciated.
No, it is not a CRM. You could be confused with the term "clients". But it has nothing to do with commercial activity, customers, prices, etc. I would not want to go to deeply into philosophy ))
I just want clarity on concrete questions
some of this is a bit negative - for the features you are describing Umbraco could be absolutely fine - a CRM may well be overkill for what you need.
specifically on your points
1) No - members is for public users who will be logging into the system - if you were going to allow your clients to log in and see their page this would be appropriate but as you are not allowing public access then there is no advantage to using this tooling for that.
2) Yes - 10k is a small number of nodes - though you may find that some of the extensions that allow you to create a virtual A-Z for the customer data to sit beneath in the tree would help you manage this
3) YES = Umbraco is brilliant for this. Compared to most CRM this is quite easy the back office is very easily extendable and there are a lot of tools to help with this. And Yes there are capabilities to do all of these things.
4) YES - there are quite a few other ways to do this in code - including excellent .net & JS apis
If you need any help - do let me know and I am happy to talk it through on the phone if you want. But just want you to know that there are many people successfully using Umbraco in this way as you describe.
Agree with John - Umbraco can handle everything you describe absolutely fine. Actually I would say Umbraco can be developed as a CRM if that is what is required but I don't think that is what you are looking for.
The aspect of this that you may not have realised is that Umbraco is completely open-source and therefore you can develop and configure it without even touching the backoffice... in my experience it is the most configurable and you can completely redevelop the backoffice if you so wish.
Most developers here will be experienced in developing .net applications or sites and most will be using tools such as Microsoft Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code in order to develop their sites.
Asp.net applications are much more adept at scalability so would be the source code of choice for anything that would potentially grow to high numbers of users - although it can be used at any level.
Before you make your decision I would highly recommend visiting the Github Pages and reading the documentation. You will then get a sense of whether or not Umbraco is for you (which it is :D)
The more I think about overall design of the webapp, the more I come to the conclusion that I should be focusing on one main direction - customizing only backoffice without doing anything for front-end as public part is not necessary. But then it will be needed to do everything in backoffice with different access rights to different parts (content nodes) shared among registered users.
I can see from documentation and tutorials that it has capabilities for doing that. For example, I might have to create various Categories implementing them as child nodes of certain doc types. Why categories' items as nodes but not options of dropdownlist for example? Because it will be convenient to avoid redundancy and create reporting tools. I hope that it will be possible to do this in backoffice and adapt it as per specific needs.
Many thanks to all for the replies! I am quite unfamiliar with Umbraco so far, but your answers encouraged me to continue exploring it.
Need to decide whether to use Umbraco as a CMS
I am currently at the stage of trying to choose CMS for new app. It is even supposed to be not a web site, but kind of web-based intranet system since it should be available only within the company.
The main goal is to manage Clients of the company and everything else related to various business and linkages with those clients. Important thing is that the app should be used and filled in with data by all staff. If it would be Umbraco, obviously I have to decide on the following:
Any your advice, ideas and answers will be very much appreciated.
You are describing a CRM ….. Customer Relationship Management.
Look at Dynamics 365 or a SharePoint solution
No, it is not a CRM. You could be confused with the term "clients". But it has nothing to do with commercial activity, customers, prices, etc. I would not want to go to deeply into philosophy )) I just want clarity on concrete questions
some of this is a bit negative - for the features you are describing Umbraco could be absolutely fine - a CRM may well be overkill for what you need.
specifically on your points 1) No - members is for public users who will be logging into the system - if you were going to allow your clients to log in and see their page this would be appropriate but as you are not allowing public access then there is no advantage to using this tooling for that.
2) Yes - 10k is a small number of nodes - though you may find that some of the extensions that allow you to create a virtual A-Z for the customer data to sit beneath in the tree would help you manage this
3) YES = Umbraco is brilliant for this. Compared to most CRM this is quite easy the back office is very easily extendable and there are a lot of tools to help with this. And Yes there are capabilities to do all of these things.
4) YES - there are quite a few other ways to do this in code - including excellent .net & JS apis
If you need any help - do let me know and I am happy to talk it through on the phone if you want. But just want you to know that there are many people successfully using Umbraco in this way as you describe.
Agree with John - Umbraco can handle everything you describe absolutely fine. Actually I would say Umbraco can be developed as a CRM if that is what is required but I don't think that is what you are looking for.
The aspect of this that you may not have realised is that Umbraco is completely open-source and therefore you can develop and configure it without even touching the backoffice... in my experience it is the most configurable and you can completely redevelop the backoffice if you so wish.
Most developers here will be experienced in developing .net applications or sites and most will be using tools such as Microsoft Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code in order to develop their sites.
Asp.net applications are much more adept at scalability so would be the source code of choice for anything that would potentially grow to high numbers of users - although it can be used at any level.
Before you make your decision I would highly recommend visiting the Github Pages and reading the documentation. You will then get a sense of whether or not Umbraco is for you (which it is :D)
The more I think about overall design of the webapp, the more I come to the conclusion that I should be focusing on one main direction - customizing only backoffice without doing anything for front-end as public part is not necessary. But then it will be needed to do everything in backoffice with different access rights to different parts (content nodes) shared among registered users.
I can see from documentation and tutorials that it has capabilities for doing that. For example, I might have to create various Categories implementing them as child nodes of certain doc types. Why categories' items as nodes but not options of dropdownlist for example? Because it will be convenient to avoid redundancy and create reporting tools. I hope that it will be possible to do this in backoffice and adapt it as per specific needs.
Many thanks to all for the replies! I am quite unfamiliar with Umbraco so far, but your answers encouraged me to continue exploring it.
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