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An Umbraco Upgrade for the Department of Revenue

When the South Dakota Department of Revenue needed to upgrade its site across five versions of Umbraco, it turned to Blend Interactive, a team well-versed in Umbraco upgrades.

Client

  • South Dakota Department of Revenue

The world can be hectic, especially if you’re running communication for an important communication-forward state agency, and especially if that agency is already at the heart of a dozen high-visibility initiatives — from maintaining vehicle licenses and registrations to state business taxes — like the South Dakota Department of Revenue (SD DOR).

This is why it was no surprise that SD DOR needed to catch up on its Umbraco web upgrades. With so many ongoing content updates and policy movements, losing track of web infrastructure is easy. Thankfully, it’s not uncommon — and it’s something that we at Blend were born to take care of.

However, SD DOR wasn’t just looking at a single Umbraco upgrade — they were, in essence, looking at five upgrades, moving from their installed Version 8 to the newest Version 13. In addition to warranty compliance and security updates, the move from Version 8 to Version 13 promised significant improvements to how content is managed and what can be done with blocks page-by-page.

We’ve been in this boat before and knew exactly what to do. Umbraco’s move to .NET Core during Version 9 is the main sticking point in making this upgrade jump. This means there is no longer a direct upgrade path from older to newer versions — instead, development teams must make two actual upgrade projects: one moving the site to .NET Core and one to the most recent version.

Blend’s Umbraco team has made this a hobby, successfully handling this shift across several clients’ sites. For SD DOR, Blend first moved the site to Umbraco 10, allowing our team to handle database updates. We made database updates from here, bringing the system up to Umbraco 13.

This process involved updating a few functionality items to reflect the new system and aligning other add-ons and integrations to do the same, from Solr search to the South Dakota Bureau of Information and Telecommunications’ production server and site.

When it was all done, Blend had essentially made five upgrades at once, moving SD DOR’s site into the future and ensuring that their investment could continue as efficiently as possible.

Project results.

  • Successfully upgraded SD DOR’s site to the most recent version of Umbraco.

Umbraco

The friendly, open-source CMS that supports your workflows, empowers your editors, and takes your website’s performance to new heights.

A deep history of work.

Blend has been working with Umbraco since 2013, and has developed sites in numerous verticals.

2024 Platinum Partner.

Blend is a Platinum Solution Partner with five Umbraco certified developers on staff.

Contributing Partner

In addition to being a Gold partner, Blend is one of 2023's Contributing Gold Partners, given to agencies that go above and beyond to contribute to Umbraco's open-source project and community.