Being part of the Azure Websites Customer Advisory Board

Recently we were invited by Microsoft to join the Azure Websites Customer Advisory Board, a group of selected IT professionals working daily with Azure, helping shape the platform. Representatives from the widely used .NET web systems Sitecore, DNN and Umbraco are also part of Azure CABs.

This way we'll be able to contribute to enhance the Azure experience that many Orchard developers face daily too. The CAB membership will allow us to make DotNest, the Orchard SaaS better utilize Azure and thus continue to improve as an Orchard-based CMS as a Service platform.

Orchard now has the strongest presence among all content management frameworks in the Azure Websites CAB: the two founders of Lombiq, Zoltán and Benedek became members and Sebastien Ros from Microsoft, the lead developer of Orchard takes part on the CAB meetings too.

Update as of May, 2015: Microsoft Customer Advisory Boards were converted into what is now Azure Advisors. Lombiq's membership was transferred, so we're now part of Azure Advisors.

zoltan.lehoczky Microsoft Azure Websites CAB Azure

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Building Relationships Beyond Our Bubble: The Communities We Joined This Year
If you know Lombiq, you probably know us from GitHub, from the Orchard Core project itself, or from a developer conference. A chamber of commerce or a CMS industry panel isn't the first place you'd expect to find us. But over the past year, we joined five business and industry communities, and we did it on purpose. We know the open-source and developer world well. It's where Lombiq comes from, and where most people know us. But the people who decide which partner to build with, or which platform to trust, mostly aren't there. We wanted to meet them, and we started by joining these communities. This is what each of them has brought us so far. Boye & Company: CMS Experts Boye & Company's CMS Experts group is the one that sits closest to our world. It's a vendor-neutral peer community of digital leaders, agencies, analysts, and platform vendors who compare notes on where content management and digital experience are heading. While some of them already knew Orchard Core, until we joined, it wasn't really in the picture there. That changed quickly. We took part in CMS Summit 26 in Frankfurt, among the agency and consultancy participants, at an event focused on AI, digital experience, governance, workflows, and platforms. Beyond the membership, the real value was in the conversations. When structured content, metadata, and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)/Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) came up, we could show where Orchard Core fits. Outside the .NET world, Orchard Core doesn't usually come up in these discussions. HBBA Global HBBA Global is a UK–Hungary business network. For us, the value here is access. For a Hungarian company building for English-speaking markets, these networks connect us with UK-based partners who can open doors to companies we'd struggle to reach directly from Hungary. HBBA introduced us as a builder of complex digital systems for English-language markets, with clients like WTW and Microsoft. Some of that work is easy to picture: a VIP ticketing portal for Live Nation, or the music catalog the Smithsonian calls Spotify for folk music. And it's been an active year, mostly in London. We joined HBBA's Innovation Unleashed summit at the Embassy of Hungary, a fast networking session that ran to around thirty real conversations in two hours. In April, Márk and Zoltán were at HBBA's "When Leadership Meets Strategy" event at The Shard. And in May, Benedek and Zoltán spent several packed days in the city, including HBBA's "AI or Be Left Behind" summit on turning AI strategy into operational reality. In these markets, a cold email usually goes nowhere; the conversations that matter start in person. That's also why we show up beyond the formal events. While we're in London, roughly every month, we drop in on local networking too, like Business Buzz in Canary Wharf. If you're around and want to meet, there's a good chance we can! AmCham and BCCH We also joined two chambers of commerce this year. We're now a member of AmCham Hungary, the American Chamber of Commerce, which connects us with the US business community in Budapest. We first stopped by in June as guests at the INSIGHT Reception, a mid-year gathering at Albemarle's new Budapest headquarters with a little over a hundred people from AmCham's boards, committees, and working groups. It was a part of the business community we hadn't been close to before. We also joined the British Chamber of Commerce in Hungary (BCCH) to strengthen our UK-facing network, alongside the HBBA work. We've since been to a couple of its events, including its 2026 Annual General Meeting and the IBCC x BCCH Signature Golf Experience in June. CCIFH Most recently, we joined CCIFH, the French-Hungarian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (also known as CCI France Hongrie), the leading Francophone business network in Hungary. It's the newest of these memberships, so we're just getting started. We've been to our first event with them so far, with more to come. What it brings back to the work These memberships aren't logos for a page. They're worth the time because they feed back into what we build and how we talk about it. They give us three things. First, we get a feel for where CMS and digital experience are going, from structured content to GEO and AEO. It shapes how we build and what we recommend to clients. Second, we meet partners in the UK and US markets we build for. And third, we get in front of the kind of organizations we're a good fit for, the ones we don't usually meet through the open-source world. It's something we've written about before. Years ago, being part of the Azure Websites Customer Advisory Board gave us platform-level feedback that fed straight back into our own products and projects. These communities are different, and the stage is wider, but the idea is the same: you learn more, and you're more useful, when you show up in person. Are you in one of these communities too, or looking for a partner for a serious web project? Get in touch.

Integrate Microsoft login into your ASP.NET Core or Orchard Core application with ease

Why create separate accounts in different systems when you can use a single, trusted source for all of them?

Instead of asking people to create yet another account, you can let them sign in with the Microsoft account they already use at work. This can be a Microsoft 365 account or an account managed through Microsoft Entra ID.

For users, this feels familiar. For administrators, it keeps account management closer to the systems they already use every day.

Managed CMS Hosting Now Available in the Microsoft Marketplace — Powered by DotNest
Microsoft customers worldwide can now discover and use DotNest, a fully managed website hosting platform, through Microsoft Marketplace, accessing trusted solutions that accelerate innovation and business transformation with unified integration across Microsoft productsBudapest, Hungary — June 23, 2026 — Lombiq Technologies today announced the availability of DotNest, a fully managed content management and website hosting platform, in the Microsoft Marketplace, the unified online destination for customers to buy trusted cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet their business needs. DotNest customers can now discover and deploy trusted solutions through Microsoft Marketplace, with smooth integration and streamlined management across Microsoft Azure and other Microsoft products.DotNest is the only fully managed hosting service for Orchard Core, the open-source, modular content management system (CMS) framework built on ASP.NET Core. Built and operated by Lombiq Technologies, a major contributor to the Orchard project for more than a decade, DotNest brings enterprise-grade Orchard Core hosting to organizations without the complexity of running their own infrastructure. Today, DotNest powers more than 6,000 websites worldwide.DotNest delivers Orchard Core as a fully managed SaaS on Microsoft Azure, removing the infrastructure burden of server management, security patching, and version upgrades. Now available in the Microsoft Marketplace, organizations can procure DotNest directly through their existing Azure subscription and manage their websites from the Azure Portal alongside their other cloud resources. Key capabilities include:Zero technical maintenance: Hosting, monitoring, and platform updates are handled automatically so teams can focus on building, not operating.Native Azure integration: Sites are provisioned and managed from the Azure Portal, backed by Azure security, point-in-time backups, HTTPS, and geo-redundant storage.Complete design freedom: Full Orchard Core customization is preserved, with automatic theme deployment from source control and support for custom content types and modules.Built-in ecommerce: Organizations can launch online stores using the integrated Orchard Core Commerce suite without additional platform setup.Enterprise performance: Optimized infrastructure with CDN, caching, Elasticsearch, and email delivery requires no infrastructure configuration from the customer.GDPR compliance: DotNest is compliant out of the box with privacy-focused defaults suited for EU organizations.The offering is designed for IT teams looking to reduce infrastructure overhead, marketing teams that want to launch and update web properties without depending on development cycles, and digital agencies that prefer to focus on customization rather than operations. "Bringing DotNest to the Microsoft Marketplace is a natural step for us,” said Zoltán Lehóczky, Co-Founder and managing director of Lombiq Technologies. “We have spent over ten years building DotNest and contributing to Orchard Core itself. Listing in the Microsoft Marketplace means any Microsoft customer can now provision a fully managed Orchard Core site in minutes, using the same Azure subscription they already rely on for everything else, no separate procurement, no infrastructure work, and no compromise on the flexibility of the open-source platform.” “Microsoft Marketplace helps organizations and partners move faster, work smarter, and grow by connecting them with the right solutions—all in one trusted place,” said Cyril Belikoff, vice president, Microsoft Azure Product Marketing. “We’re happy to welcome Lombiq Technologies’ DotNest solution to the growing Microsoft Marketplace ecosystem.” Microsoft Marketplace is a single destination to find, try, and buy trusted cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet your business objectives. Choose from a growing collection of solutions tailored to your unique needs, available both in Marketplace and directly within Microsoft products. DotNest is available now in the Microsoft Marketplace at https://marketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/product/saas/lombiq.dotnest-production. To learn more about DotNest, visit https://dotnest.com. Lombiq Technologies is a software, training, and services company focused on web development with open Microsoft technologies, predominantly the Orchard Core content management system. With more than a decade of contributions to the Orchard Core ecosystem, Lombiq provides custom development, training, consulting, and hosting services to clients worldwide. The company is the team behind DotNest, the only Orchard Core SaaS. Learn more at https://lombiq.com. For more information, press only: Lombiq Crew, Lombiq Technologies, [email protected]

Long-term Orchard Core maintenance for the City of Santa Monica

Back in 2021, we wrote about helping the City of Santa Monica move santamonica.gov from Orchard 1 to Orchard Core. Since then, we have continued working with the City's team.

In the last couple of years, much of that work has been maintenance: upgrading Orchard Core, improving tests, making local development easier, cleaning up the codebase, and fixing performance issues.

The Orchard Core upgrade was an important part of this. Keeping the CMS version current helps the site stay on a safer and better-supported foundation. It also brings in fixes from Orchard Core itself, including fixes for issues that could otherwise affect users, editors, or developers.

The other changes support the same kind of work. Automated tests help catch problems before deployment. Auto Setup makes local development more predictable. Static analyzers, codespell, and Renovate make the codebase easier to maintain. 

Most of this is not visible from the outside, but it is important for keeping a long-running website working well.