Well, here's the 2nd blog post from the Umbraco London Festival 2010...enjoy!

Niels Hartvig - Umbraco Founder
The first talk was from Niels Hartvig, the founder of Umbraco who gave a great potted history of Umbraco, where it came from and where it is going.

You can see Niels's talk on the Umbraco Streaming site.

It's always interesting to listen to Niels talk so passionately about Umbraco and how it has grown from a small glint in his eye to where it is now, with a fast growing international community of users and developers, who seem to be equally as passionate about the product as he is.

And it is this community of devoted Umbracians that gives Umbraco the edge over some other CMS's in the market today. It's what drives the product forward and makes it such an easy to use and flexible platform both for developers and content editors.

Anyway, without waffling on too much, here are some salient points from Niels' speech and the relevant times in the video so you can jump to them if you wish...:-

Umbraco history - 3m:00s
Niels's description of where Umbraco started is a great talk and gives a great insight into the history of Umbraco and where it started.

User interface core team - 24m:20s
Niels honoured us with some fantastic announcements at the event. The first of which was the introduction of a second core team that will work in conjunction with the current core team. The new core team will focus on user experience and interface design of the product as opposed to technical areas or the Umbraco CMS.

This is something we feel will add even greater value to the platform, ensuring any new developments and user interface research is integrated into the admin interface.

New Shiny Umbraco.org site - 28m:10s
Niels also announced the launch of the new and improved umbraco.org website which he made live at the event with the click of a mouse. Even over one of the slowest 3G networks in Europe Umbraco worked like clockwork and then it was live.

Microsoft relationship - 33m:33s
Microsoft have been particularly interested in Umbraco of late, Paul Sterling, one of the Umbraco HQ has been working closely with Microsoft in the US and also a lot more Microsoft evangelists are talking about Umbraco.

MS SQL Compact Edition for Umbraco Juno v4.6 - 34m:06s
To make Umbraco as flexible as possible, MS SQL Compact edition will be available as part of the installer process for Umbraco Juno making it able to be installed in Medium trust on the some of the more cost effective web hosts.

Prodigy Windows Phone 7 plugin and API - 34m:32s
Niels demonstrated a new webservice API and a reference application for windows phone 7 that he has been working to develop with Microsoft. It allows you to easily create and connect to mobile devices - Windows Phone 7 in particular.

The API provides an easy way to create apps for WP7 to allow editors to monitor administrative tasks whilst on the move if required.

New default dashboards controls - 45m:00s
New default dashboards have been added to Umbraco Juno so more information can be added easily to the dashboard when a user first logs in. More options have been added such as 'Show Once' which will display a tickbox allowing the user to hide the control thenext time they log in.

Also permissions have been added to dashboard controls to allow greater control over who see what.

Installer screens and JUNO - 47m:22s
The announcement that we at The CogWorks are particularly proud of was the demonstration of Juno (Umbraco 4.6) and the new simple installer and skinning process for users to get up and running quickly with Umbraco.

The CogWorks are working with the Niels and the Umbraco core team to fully re-design the Umbraco installer process.

It is a project that Dan Ashton our Creative Director has taken on personally, drawing on his years of design, information architecture and usability knowledge, to make the process as user friendly and easy to use as possible.

We'll be posting some blogs about this design process and how its progressing over the next few weeks.

Skinning enhancements 48m:13s
Connected to the installer process is the addition of a range of default skins for Umbraco. As part of the installer process, the user is asked whether they wish to install a skin. They can then adjust colours, logos, banners etc.

Module injections 51m:59s
Also connected to this is the ability to add modules to the skin really easily

Well, I think thats about all for Niels' talk. Let me know if I have missed anything or got anything wrong and I will add update the entry.