Both CMS's, of course, comes with an administration interface. I'll assume that you are familliar with the EPiServer OnlineCenter Dashboard, and the EPiServer CMS Edit- and Admin-modes. However, if you're an Umbracian, I suppose you can imagine, and get the general idea of how EPiServer is laid out. Again, this comparison is not intended to establish which CMS is better, but to serve as a translation of sorts, between the two systems, to get you, as an EPiServer developer, started with Umbraco. This part is intended to give a brief orientation about the tool, and I'll go into greater detail about the various concepts as I get there throughout the series.
The default sections of Umbraco are Content, Media, Users, Members, Settings, and Developer. When you first log in to Umbraco, what you see is normally the "Content" "section", this roughly translates to the EPiServer CMS Edit-mode, and it features the functionality needed to edit, save, publish and work with permissions for content. WHen you have a clean install of Umbraco, there won't be anything here, since, just as in EPiServer, you need DocumentTypes (PageTypes) in order to have Documents (Pages).
The Media section is an ordered structure for Media, i.e. files and folders, that can be used , and re-used, from Documents. It's the equivalent of the file browser in EPiServer, although, not implemented in the same way.
The Users section is where Users for the Umbraco UI are managed, and their respective access rights.
The Members section is where Users for the website are managed. In Umbraco, this is the MembershipProvider that you configure. The Members section is used to manage Members, and it can be used to edit both the User, called a Member, and the Profile for that User.
The Settings section is where you edit the base for your website, such as Document Types, Media Types, Languages and Globalization and Templates. It can also be used to manage Stylesheets and Scripts for your website.
The Developer section is used to manage the most technical parts of the website, such as Data Types and Macros.
The rationale behind the decision to divide the building blocks for your site in Settings and Developer, can be discussed, in fact I can imagine it has been on several occasions. One could argue that Macros are on par with Templates in technicality, but I suppose there had to be a line drawn somewhere, and here it is.
There is also a dashboard, that roughly corresponds to the EPiServer OnlineCenter Dashboard, where you can load custom controls and functionality for each section, however, it doesn't have the same granular security features that EPiServer has, nor does it rely or ASP.NET MVC to build these "gadgets", they are simple (or, in some cases, not so simple) UserControls, but they can be used for really powerful stuff. Your imagination sets the limits here.
To sum it all up, coming from EPiServer, the Content- and Media sections corresponds to the EPiServer CMS Edit-mode, and Users, Members, Settings and Developer correspond to the Admin-mode. Also note, that some tasks that are handled in EPiServer configuration, are done from the UI in Umbraco, and vice-versa. I'll try to amek sure to point these out as I get there.
(This post was previously published here.)