Long-term benefits for the Danish government after moving to Umbraco

JAKALA partnered with SBST to address the urgent challenge of migrating the complex bygningsreglementet.dk website from an outdated Sitecore platform to a modern, cost-efficient solution. Facing significant time and budget constraints, JAKALA implemented a multisite Umbraco Cloud setup, consolidating SBST's platforms while maintaining separation for individual solutions. Leveraging Enterspeed’s Sitecore connector, the JAKALA team efficiently migrated and restructured over 50,000 data items, ensuring compatibility with Umbraco, and optimising content and references for seamless integration. This approach enabled the delivery of a 1:1 transfer of functionality, allowing redesigns and enhancements to be addressed in future phases.

Despite the tight timeline and government budget limit, JAKALA successfully completed the project within four months, delivering a live solution by November 2024. By eliminating high licensing and hosting costs associated with Sitecore, the project is set to pay for itself by the end of 2025, securing future maintenance and support for bygningsreglementet.dk. This collaboration highlights JAKALA's ability to deliver high-quality, scalable solutions under challenging conditions, ensuring long-term value for the client.

At a glance

After the jurisdictional restructuring in 2023, SBST became an independent agency after being part of the Danish Transport, Construction, and Housing Authority (TBST). Since then, SBST has been working on migrating and consolidating its solutions under a new platform (www.gobasic.dk). This platform is based on standard software, and as some of SBST's websites are complex, they cannot be supported through standard programs. This has created a significant challenge, as SBST only realized late in the process that bygningsreglementet.dk could not be migrated, resulting in considerable time pressure.

Bygningsreglementet.dk contains current laws, regulations, and historical versions, allowing users to look up what rules were in effect when a building was constructed. The site contains 50.000+ items in bespoke Sitecore implementation, where most of the codebase had not been maintained since 2013. This solution was the last part of TBST's old multisite Sitecore setup, leading to high license and hosting costs.

SBST also cannot further develop bygningsreglementet.dk, as its codebase is outdated, with much of its functionality encapsulated in compiled DLLs from the original provider. Due to the need to fix multiple errors in the solution (including the search functionality) and ensure compliance with WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility requirements and future needs, it became necessary to reimplement the solution and migrate significant volumes of data.

In order to save on the 2025 budget, SBST needed to move this website from Sitecore onto another platform before end-of-year (2024). This posed a serious constraint as this need was identified in mid-2024. We delivered this project within the Danish governmental budget limits, to deliver the project quicker, and avoid having the project go into a public tender round. 

A multisite Umbraco Cloud solution was set up, allowing SBST to consolidate several of its solutions in one place, while still maintaining separation in the codebase since the individual solutions do not share content or design. This simplifies access and maintenance, resulting in savings on both license and hosting costs.

Due to the time pressure SBST was under, it was decided to migrate bygningsreglementet.dk from Sitecore to Umbraco with a 1:1 transfer of data and functionality. Redesigning the front end, design, and functionality could then be addressed in later phases.

The migration project and information architecture were critical to the project's success. Therefore, JAKALA chose to collaborate with Enterspeed (www.enterspeed.com) for this part of the project. Through their Sitecore connector, all content was migrated to the cloud, where unique data types were identified and remodelled to better fit an Umbraco setup. The data was also reviewed and cleaned, focusing on references/links to PDFs and images, which were also transferred from the Sitecore solution. Sitecore’s unique approach to presentation details were also abstracted into a format that could be used in Umbraco. Subsequently, all data types were set up in Umbraco, and the data was retrieved from Enterspeed Cloud and integrated into the solution.

Afterward, the website's functionality and display were reimplemented, and additions were made to Umbraco’s back-office to ensure feature parity with the old Sitecore solution, a new license-free search solution was implemented to further reduce cost. Moreover, content creation was optimised for editors. The first complete verification of the system was conducted by SBST in early September 2024, just four months after the project began, and the final website went live in November 2024 achieving the lofty goal.

JAKALA has also initiated the accessibility project in collaboration with SBST. First, JAKALA is preparing a report on the site’s compliance with the WCAG 2.1 AA standard, followed by the implementation of necessary adjustments to the website.