In the business world, strong productivity and agility define success. Partnering with the right digital entities is extremely important for better ROI and brand loyalty. With technological advancement, you may have to upgrade or migrate your CMS altogether. When it comes to Sitecore, go for the latest version. Sitecore 9.1 support ends in December 2021 and Sitecore 9.2 and 9.3 support ends in December 2022. If you rely on any of these versions, upgrade to Sitecore 10.x right away! Your last Sitecore 9 upgrade is going to be obsolete soon.
Upgrading to Sitecore 10.x is necessary for the following reasons:
- Containerization strategy is useful for the development and IT Ops teams. In Sitecore 10x, with the help of Docker Compose, you can get an instance up and functioning in a short span of time. Containers need lesser system resources when compared to VMs. There are also no environmental limitations in terms of operating systems. This is a big relief for development and deployment teams. By utilizing operating systems in an optimized manner, there’s a reduction in overall cost for maintenance of operating systems. As per earlier reports, Sitecore XP 10.1 was supposed to become the last version featuring both traditional and containerized installation techniques but because of time-consuming products adoption, Sitecore has further extended it to version 10.2.
- Sitecore has had Headless setup since Sitecore 9. But now, with Sitecore 10.x, the change is in the rendering layer that uses ASP.NET Core rather than Javascript libraries like Angular and React. Sitecore Experience Platform 10.2 offers the means to convert to headless Sitecore architectures without a complete rebuild. The user enjoys the advantage of a headless/decoupled setup without any compulsion of having to program in one language at the backend (C#) and another at the frontend. What are the benefits of such a decoupled format? Installations and upgrades are easier. One can debug directly from the visual studio. Frontend developers only require ASP.NET Core Rendering Host project – no installation needed.
- Sitecore AI Auto Personalization lets people begin the process of personalization instantly. There’s no need to manually define user segments. AI Auto Personalization is not only limited to this! It can be enabled for images, text snippets and CTAs for websites. You can rely on AI analytics (that provides information like engagement and bounce rates) that assists in personalization performance visibility for your brand’s online success. Sitecore can recognize visitor trends, create customer segments, and alter page elements independently. Customers enjoy personalized experiences and businesses working towards AI Auto Personalization for their customers is definitely a step forward.
- Sitecore Horizon is a user-friendly editor interface that brings the content editing experience to present day novelties and offers marketers new attractive features. Horizon has a more intuitive user interface that unites the goodness of Content Editor and Experience Editor. With Sitecore 10.1 and later versions, the users can easily search for pages, content and media items in Horizon. They can develop and edit data source items, publish items with subitems, edit link fields, number of fields, checklists and drop-down menu fields.
- Marketers, developers and businesses can launch webpages and marketing campaigns quickly due to faster and seamless deployment. Because of application isolation, relevant resources can be shared with multiple teams and external agencies with less risk. External entities will not gain access to the entire network. Developers can conveniently investigate issues of consistency and reproducibility at their end and solve them one by one.
Ameex’s Approach Checklist to Sitecore Upgrade
- Backup Existing Sitecore Instance
- Infrastructure Upgrade
- Sitecore DB Upgrade
- Upgrade Package Installation
- Sitecore Solution Upgrade
- Sitecore Modules Upgrade
- xDB Data Migration
- Form Data Migration
- Ensure Zero Downtime During Upgrade
- Ensure Content Freeze for Content Authors
Go for Sitecore 10 latest version and let us know what you think of it. Don’t know how to upgrade to Sitecore? Contact us now!
