Say Goodbye! To Your Older Version Of Sitecore Instance – Upgrade Your System

Upgrading to a new website is no simple task. New design, new content structure, new Sitecore, new solution architecture and what not. Everything is regenerated except a large segment of the content. Despite of all this, every client at one stage or another would want to upgrade their Sitecore version in order to cope up with the current market trends. Clients do not want to fall behind with the everyday increasing customer’s demand. Thus, to be on the cutting edge they opt for the latest version of Sitecore instance that let businesses to carry out marketing automation with their data, new experience cloud and several other advancements.

Analyze And Select The Right Upgrade Approach

Incremental upgrade using Update Packages

In this approach Sitecore provides Upgrade guide, Release notes, Update Packages to install, Db scripts to execute, Configuration files to merge/overwrite and some additional setting to be done based on the version you are upgrading to. In the incremental approach you start from you current Sitecore version and perform manual upgrades to every major version released, all the way to your targeted version.

Migrating content to a clean Sitecore instance (using the latest version)

In this approach, you take a fresh Sitecore instance of the latest version, package all your custom content items (and files) from your old instance and install them into the new instance. This method is generally faster than installing incremental update packages (especially when upgrading from <8.1).

Using the Express Migration Tool

Upgrading from 6.6 or 7.2 to the latest version involves a large number of incremental updates which makes them very time consuming and complex. Therefore, Sitecore has introduced the Express Migration Tool to help the users by making this a seamless process. This tool is Windows Executable that can be run locally. The tool migrates entities from your old instance to a new, clean instance of the latest version. The Express Migration Tool supports 6.6 & 7.2 revisions as your source (old) version and supports 8.2 update-1 as your chosen (new) version. The tool can also migrate WFFM from 2.4 to 8.2 update-1.

Why Upgrade?

Security

It is very crucial to protect your personal identifiable information as well as the performance of your website. Upgrading your Sitecore prevents countless risks to security and also enhances website performance

User Benefits

A desired upgrade in your existing sitecore version brings advanced capabilities it has which imparts supremely best user experience to all the Sitecore users. For marketers who are involved in content maintenance, the upgrade offers effective cross-channel capabilities for organizations that influence customers across many touch-points.

Support

Support becomes more difficult for Sitecore users operating on older versions. In December 2015 Sitecore support for versions older than 7.x stopped. Additionally upgrading beyond 7.x can improve user interface, provides automatic testing and optimization.

Customer-Centric Upgrade

Browsing compatibility is one of the major concerns for most of the organizations where consumer expects a better and smooth digital journey which the businesses fail to provide due to lack of adaptability to newer versions. Features like Sitecore Cortex are already helping enterprises to get closer to their customers and to create customized user experiences.

Advancements

Sitecore latest upgrades allows for even more integrations with other tools. Commerce connect is also a key feature in Sitecore version 8 that will benefit enterprises in the ecommerce business by allowing them to keep their site data and ecommerce data well organized in one central location. Version 9 is about contextual marketing, which is the main trend at present.

Get Help From Our Experts

Version To Version Migration

As latest and improved versions of Sitecore Platform are released we assist in version to version migration. We can migrate entities from your old instance to a new, clean instance of the latest version (Sitecore 8.2).