April 16, 2015
Considerations for upgrading your Sitecore version
April 16, 2015
Considerations for upgrading your Sitecore version
There has been much publicity around Sitecore’s latest releases, version 7.5 and version 8, which come with significant advancements in marketing and customer experience management. For many organizations, the decision to and justification for upgrading can be challenging, especially if their current build is stable and daily operations are running smoothly. This document will act as a guide for organizations so that they can understand the benefits, risks and associated costs of upgrading to Sitecore version 7.5 or version 8.
The following table outlines the key differences and advancements in the most commonly deployed versions of Sitecore as of Q1 2015, with the timeframes of each major and minor release. Generally, Sitecore releases a minor update once or twice a quarter, and a major update twice a year, with the latest two, 7.5 and 8.0, released in quick succession.
For more detail on the enhancements in each version, see Appendix A.
Sitecore Major Version |
Distinguishing Features |
6.5 - 6.6 “second generation DMS” |
|
7.0 - 7.2 “content scalability” |
|
7.5 “analytics scalability” |
|
8.0 – 8.1 “next generation experience management platform” |
|
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Depending on which version you’re currently using, and which you wish to upgrade to, there are many opportunities that come from moving to newer versions of the product. That said, with opportunity comes the need for investment, so we’ve attempted to divide these opportunities into efficiency improvements and functional enhancements.
Each minor release of Sitecore contains multiple fixes for the most common pain points in the day-to-day operation of a Sitecore website:
Historically, content management systems strived to enable content authors, while removing IT staff from day-to-day operations with the web presence. That change results in added ROI and allows those IT resources to focus on areas of the business where their expertise could add real value to the organization.
With Sitecore’s increasingly sophisticated marketing features, this efficiency can extend to enabling marketers to configure and publish personalization rules, content tests and engagement plans without a developer’s support (assuming the build has been architected to support it).
The latest versions of Sitecore fully support deployment of both content management and xDB to the cloud, with Sitecore Azure and hosted xDB offerings. This change allows organizations to outsource the complexity of procuring, configuring and maintaining newer technologies such as MongoDB, especially in high-traffic scenarios.
Newer versions of Sitecore offer faster and better integrated ways to test your website and campaigns against numerous mobile devices, email clients, spam checkers and more.
With Sitecore version 7.0 and later, the new search API and search interfaces offer a vastly superior experience, with high-performing indices and facets for filtering results. This holds particular advantages for content authors sharing a library of assets, especially in a content repository scenario where a distributed group needs an efficient way to share digital media.
Newer versions of Sitecore support a more flexible provider-based architecture, abstracting the interface between Sitecore and search engine, e-commerce and media platforms to allow different platforms to be swapped in. If your organization has already invested in an existing such platform, this architecture would support a more streamlined integration with Sitecore.
A Sitecore development team’s efficiency can be greatly improved with application lifecycle management, continuous integration tools and development frameworks which each have their own improvement roadmaps. Staying up-to-date with Sitecore means your developers can use the latest tools and access support and training that may no longer be available for older tools.
These are upgrade benefits that introduce significant new capabilities to your marketing team’s toolkit, but require some investment in training, planning and deployment. That said, the impact on hard metrics such as Cost per Lead, when using Sitecore, may demonstrate a higher ROI on the (relatively) low cost of upgrading.
This is arguably one of the biggest benefits to upgrading Sitecore. If you’ve laid the groundwork of a well-designed, responsive website, you can now use that website as a strategic marketing tool – reaching multiple channels and audiences, understanding visitor behavior and truly embracing a culture of continuous optimization. See further details in Appendix A.
The Experience Profile is particularly powerful in scenarios where an individual-level view of a customer or prospect can be leveraged, such as in a lead nurturing scenario by a CRM or where public sources could greatly streamline a salesperson’s process. Alternatively, it could be used in a customer service scenario, where aggregating the visitor’s website behavior with other datasets allows for personalization and could potentially influence the prospect.
With Sitecore 7+, organizations can leverage an increasingly broad and sophisticated set of modules and add-ons to support solution requirements and marketing activities, with the existing modules showing the improvement incrementally in tandem. A few examples include:
Coveo for Sitecore has released a Free Edition of its search engine for Sitecore 7+
Federated Experience Manager allows organizations to track and personalize non-Sitecore powered websites, using the Sitecore Experience Platform, for Sitecore 7.2+
Sitecore Commerce is available for Sitecore 7.2+
The question of upgrading brings with it an opportunity to assess the state and versions of underlying infrastructure and add-ons. Many organizations take the opportunity to modernize infrastructure and rebuild their solution with refreshed branding; if the solution is a few years old it may need to be re-architected to fully support new Sitecore features.
If you serve localized and/or multi-lingual content, the newest version of Sitecore gives you more flexibility to display a different presentation for different versions of the same item. Previously, if you had a content item with an English version and a French version, the presentation layout was shared between them. Now, you can specify a different layout for each, allowing a more customized user experience for each language and/or localized brand.
Once you’ve established a stable implementation and a well-trained team who are comfortable with daily tasks, the prospect of upgrading may cause some hesitation.
Our recommended approach for major upgrades includes the following activities. Upgrading Sitecore generally involves a series of incremental upgrades, database schema updates and concurrent module upgrades.
Generally, this can be performed over a period of 2-4 weeks, depending on the complexity of the upgrade and number of client instances.
Other areas of investment to maximize ROI of the upgrade:
The sections above have outlined key areas of “softer” return on investment, chiefly outlining benefits, costs and risks of upgrading your Sitecore deployment in support of making the case to necessary stakeholders. It is more difficult to quantify a hard ROI number on an upgrade, as each organization’s goals, processes and solutions will widely vary.
There are a few metrics that can be used to assemble a calculation, if necessary. Organizations should frame the upgrade ROI by focusing on solving a specific issue or process, such as improving content author efficiency or reducing cost per lead, and by tying efforts to top-line growth. The heavy lifting will come from establishing baselines of performance to forecast improvements.
To establish baselines and project improvements, organizations should look to embrace a culture of measurement and ongoing optimization in order to regularly track calculation metrics over a specific time period, such as Cost Per Lead, Publishing Time, or Content Author Time-on-Task. Sitecore’s whitepaper Five Ways to Demonstrate Clear ROI outlines five strategies for exploiting Sitecore’s capabilities as such.
To establish investment costs, organizations should consider the TCO of the upgrade over the same period of time. These costs will likely include:
Making the effort to begin consistent measurement can result in concrete financial gains. Tracking and acting upon engagement metrics, centralizing cross-channel performance data within the product, and using this information to optimize your site(s) really works, as explored in Sitecore’s whitepaper, Marketing Gold: Connecting Integrated Multichannel Marketing with Business Growth.
For a more in-depth review of overall Sitecore ROI, also see The Total Economic Impact Of Sitecore CMS, a Forrester ROI study commissioned by Sitecore, evaluating the total economic impact and potential return on investment that enterprises may realize by deploying Sitecore CMS.
Here is a collection of articles and blog posts that provide further information on Sitecore 7.5 and Sitecore 8, the xDB and considerations when upgrading or implementing.
The following table outlines more detail on the most helpful and impactful enhancements for each version starting at v6.5. Please see SDN for full Release Notes on each version:
Please note that multiple issues are resolved with each new release, particularly around browser compatibility, interface bugs, performance issues and security vulnerabilities.
Version |
Key Enhancements |
6.5 |
DMS 2.0 released
Page Editor improvements
|
6.6 |
New supporting applications
Developer goodies
|
7.0 |
Content Scalability
Search improvements
|
7.1 |
Developer goodies
|
7.2 |
Publishing improvements
Developer goodies
|
7.5 |
Introduction of Sitecore Experience Database (xDB)
Developer goodies
|
8.0 |
Introduction of next-generation Experience Platform
|
Ready to start upgrading Sitecore? Take a look at our newest Sitecore upgrade offering.