Migrating CMMI Institute’s Membership Platform to a Modern Kentico Architecture

About the client

CMMI Institute provides process improvement and maturity frameworks — most notably the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI®) — helping organizations assess, standardize, and optimize operational performance, cybersecurity, and AI integration. 

The organization generates revenue through subscriptions and digital tool access, paid appraisals and certifications, and licensing to partner consulting firms and lead appraisers who deliver official CMMI services worldwide. Its platform serves a global footprint of organizations in 100+ countries, supporting registered members, certified professionals and instructors, and a searchable network of partner organizations.

Business challenge

CMMI Institute's website ran on a legacy Kentico 12 Portal Engine implementation built on .NET Framework, with content management, templates, web parts, and the frontend tightly coupled within the same application.

The primary issue was architectural rather than performance. The tightly coupled implementation made the platform harder to evolve, test, integrate, and release independently. Changes required more effort and carried greater risk, limiting how quickly the organization could respond to new business requirements.

At the same time, the platform supported important member, certification, partner, and learning workflows, so modernization could not come at the cost of disrupting existing integrations or user journeys.

Solution

Bits Orchestra migrated CMMI Institute from Kentico 12 Portal Engine to Kentico Xperience 13 MVC.

Kentico Xperience 13 MVC was selected as the lowest-risk modernization path: it allowed the organization to move away from Portal Engine and separate content management from presentation while preserving its existing Kentico investment, content, functionality, and business-critical integrations.

This was significantly more than a CMS version upgrade. Portal Engine templates, web parts, page layouts, and custom functionality could not simply be transferred to MVC. The presentation layer had to be rebuilt and existing functionality adapted to the new architecture.

One of the harder parts of the project was that development on the existing Kentico 12 platform continued in parallel while the MVC migration was underway.

Changes introduced by another team on the legacy platform had to be identified and carried into the new implementation without losing functionality or destabilizing the main migration. The team also resolved a Page Builder loading issue specific to the client's environment during implementation.

Delivery approach

The project ran as a fixed-scope engagement with a dedicated three-person team working directly with CMMI Institute.

Discovery started in July 2025, followed by development and migration from August through December. The production cutover was completed over a single weekend, followed by a January support period. A small number of post-launch issues were identified and resolved within the same working day.

Testing, debugging, regression fixes, deployment validation, and technical documentation were included as part of the migration and handover.

Technical implementation

• Kentico 13 MVC website — Rebuilt the entire presentation layer from Portal Engine to MVC, keeping existing functionality and content working throughout the architectural migration.
• Reusable Page Builder widgets — Replaced large Rich Text–based sections with configurable, reusable components, balancing editor flexibility with consistency.
• Structured content components — Converted select Rich Text content patterns into structured, repeatable components with defined configuration and rendering logic.
• Internal CRM integration — Preserved the connection between the platform and CMMI Institute's internal CRM, keeping existing member and business workflows intact through the transition.
• Learning Management Platform integration — Retrieved and displayed exam status information within the platform, reliably surfacing external system data.
• Rebuilt page layouts and presentation components — Replaced Portal Engine templates and web parts with MVC-based layouts, redesigning rather than copying legacy concepts.
• Content and functionality migration — Ensured compatibility between the upgraded Kentico platform, the new MVC presentation layer, existing content, and all integrations.

Before and after

Team

A dedicated team of three worked directly with CMMI Institute throughout the engagement, coordinating over Teams and email:

• Tech lead owned the overall architecture, guided the developers through the harder technical decisions, and reviewed the implementation against both technical and business requirements.
• Two developers owned execution: building out the platform, migrating existing functionality, and validating the release through testing and deployment.

Summary

Modernizing CMMI Institute's platform meant untangling years of tightly coupled Kentico 12 Portal Engine architecture without breaking the certification, training, and partner workflows a global membership organization depends on. By migrating to Kentico Xperience 13 MVC, preserving every existing integration, and rebuilding the editing experience around reusable Page Builder widgets, Bits Orchestra gave CMMI Institute a platform built to evolve — not just to run.

For associations and membership organizations still running legacy Kentico Portal Engine implementations, the project shows how a Kentico migration can modernize the architecture without forcing a simultaneous replacement of the business workflows already built around it.