British Medical Association

Elevating Digital Excellence in Healthcare: An Umbraco Upgrade for the British Medical Association

Since its establishment in 1832, the British Medical Association (BMA) has been the trade union and professional body for doctors and medical students across the UK. With almost 200,000 members to serve, the organisation recognised the need for an upgraded website that offered more opportunities for engagement and professional growth.

The BMA's existing website was run on Umbraco version 7 and was nearing the end of its lifecycle, no longer equipped to meet the digital demands of its members. The BMA turned to Cantarus as an Umbraco Platinum Partner to help spearhead the migration of their website from the end-of-life v7 to fully-supported v10 DXP hosted on Umbraco Cloud. The transition wasn't just a technical update, but a strategic move to harness the latest capabilities, strengthen their broader digital infrastructure, and improve the content management experience.

The Technical Challenge

The BMA's website required a full-scale digital overhaul to ensure a more seamless user experience and a platform that would effectively amplify the organisation's goals and objectives. With a looming deadline of just 12 weeks until the Umbraco upgrade cut-off date, the project's stakes were high from the get-go.

Remaining on legacy technology would pose several risks for the organisation, including a lack of support, high running costs, and a higher carbon footprint. It would also mean that the BMA would miss out on the latest Umbraco features and innovations, which would hinder their ability to stay competitive and ahead of their members.

Our Solution

As Platinum Partners with years of experience delivering Umbraco solutions, we were well-placed to provide the knowledge and expertise, and ultimately to deliver a resilient and future-proof platform tailored to the BMA's unique requirements.

Our approach was methodical. We transitioned the BMA's platform to v10 leveraging the platform’s advanced capabilities and providing a more unified and integrated experience for BMA’s members.

The upgrade from Umbraco v7 to v8 necessitated a comprehensive code rewrite by our in-house Umbraco-certified developers, which was then followed by a seamless migration to v10, all while ensuring minimal disruption to the BMA’s operations.

Embracing Umbraco Cloud

Integral to the project was the transition to Umbraco Cloud, setting up the BMA with tangible benefits such as:

Cost-effectiveness

The migration to Umbraco Cloud allowed for an overall reduced cost of ownership of the infrastructure and management of the site by:

Integration of use cases of external CDN (Cloudflare) to Umbraco Cloud provided CDN and v10 tooling, such as cache and redirect management.
Reduced staffing overhead in applying security patches, with Umbraco Cloud providing automatic minor upgrades, and Cantarus managing major upgrades.
Significant reduction in reliance and management of internally developed Microsoft Azure infrastructure.
Enhanced back-office user management through Umbraco Cloud provided unified identity management, multi-factor authentication (MFA) across multiple sites in the BMA estate.

Enhanced Performance and Security

The shift from a legacy version to a modern, supported framework, combined with an infrastructure migration to Umbraco Cloud, has accelerated the BMA's website performance, reducing page load times and site stability in periods of peak traffic, for instance strike announcements. It has also fortified the site's sustained security and paved the way for continued user experience and accessibility optimisation.

The Results

The upgraded Umbraco website has been transformative for the BMA. Not only has it elevated the BMA's digital presence, but it has provided the organisation with a highly secure, scalable, and cohesive platform that can grow alongside them.

The migration from v7 to v10 had an average 250% reduction in computational load, so has been significant in reducing the BMA’s carbon footprint.

Feedback from the BMA and their members have been overwhelmingly positive, with individuals appreciating the website's elevated ease of use, improved accessibility, and depth of enriched content on offer. The upgrade has also been the first step in preparing the groundwork for transformational future development projects, including:

Accessibility improvements to bring bma.org.uk to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) compliance, including keyboard only use.
Updated navigation structure for reduced screen clutter and a more consistent feel across desktop and mobile.
Implementing Umbraco Forms to enable use of user-friendly forms across the site for structured enquiries, allowing the BMA’s services to be more accessible in a digital-first delivery model.
Survey and Decision Tree Technology will give content editors the ability to listen and connect with organisation members in profound new ways.
Upgrading Umbraco to v13 (which wasn’t readily available at the time of writing) to leverage the latest features, and secure future maintainability on the latest long-term support version of the CMS.

Cantarus' technical expertise was invaluable throughout this project. Upgrading our website to Umbraco 10 has not only modernised our member offering but also provided us with a resilient, future-proof platform. We're confident that our website will serve our valued members for years to come.

Carolyn Brown Chief Information Officer

Want to know more?

Our Chief Delivery Officer, Brendan Killough, would love to chat with you about navigating your upgrade from legacy platforms.

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