What happens when you don't migrate to Sitecore 9.2?

The arrival of Sitecore 9.2 continues to empower marketers with some of the impeccable features that drive digital marketing today. Are you among the marketers who are still using older versions of Sitecore? If yes, then you should ask yourself why you haven’t upgraded to Sitecore 9.2 yet? Because you may be missing out on some of the unified features that promote personalized experiences for users, consumption tracking, active personalization, support for serialization and more. In this blog post, we will walk you through the promising considerations for upgrading the Sitecore version.

What’s new with Sitecore 9.2?

Sitecore XP, version 9.2, is the only experience cloud that unifies all data and interactions from campaigns and other data sources into one platform and provides you with a real-time view of your customers. Here are some of the exciting features released in Sitecore 9.2:

Content Hub

Content Hub is a native Sitecore product that helps to manage content marketing and digital assets capabilities for better collaboration in data asset management (DAM). This component also brings you closer to the entire content life-cycle within Sitecore and gives you control and connection to accelerate time to market.

Sitecore SXA and JSS

Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) and Sitecore JavaScript Services (JSS) are both frameworks that help to speed up the production of websites by reusing components across websites. This allows you to create sites and applications in the same environment, share the content presentation and customer data to achieve quicker deployment times.

Active Personalization Dashboard

This is a brand-new feature in Sitecore 9.2 which is designed to provide a holistic view of all active personalization tactics such as the total number of pages, personalized experiences, combinations of components, visitors and more in a single place. It allows you to make quicker decisions on what you are viewing.

Data Purging API

Sitecore 9.2 release offers greater control over the rich data collected by the platform. Using the data purging API, you gain control over all your solution’s data. It becomes easy to set up archiving strategies to keep your costs under control as well as have total data control to respond with changes to privacy regulations.

Rainbow Serialization Support

Using this feature, you can quickly ensure faster builds and deployments.

What are the risks of not upgrading to Sitecore 9.2?

• Sitecore platform itself is a plethora of underlying support infrastructure, each with its lifecycle and roadmap, such as Windows Server, SQL, Server and not forgetting the .NET Framework. In case of getting too far from Sitecore’s latest updates or its underlying systems, you will find decreased support for older versions.
• You are perhaps experiencing issues of browser compatibility and publishing. The newer versions are most likely to resolve such issues in an instance.
• When you do not upgrade for a long time, there is a high probability that your build will require additional adjustments to be updated to the latest Sitecore version APIs and features. This also means you will also require a broader redesign or rebuild that starts fresh with the latest version.
• Importantly, add-on modules such as Web Forms for Marketers (WFFM) or Email Experience Manager may no longer be compatible with several versions, as the innovation and development trends towards the newest version keep changing.
• And finally, threats that a public website faces are constantly changing. Therefore, staying on older versions will leave you vulnerable to security risks.

What to expect when upgrading to Sitecore 9.2?

Upgrading to Sitecore 9.2 calls out for major updates including a series of incremental upgrades, database schema updates and concurrent module upgrades.

• Evaluating the current version to understand implementing capabilities of the new version
• Upgrading local rehearsal performance
• Implementing necessary fixes to support Sitecore 9.2
• Adjusting any API changes with existing system integrations
• Understanding the impact on business process flows
• Analyzing quality assurance on a local copy
• Upgrading client environment Sitecore instances

These assessments can be performed over several weeks, depending on the complexity of your upgrade, number of client instances and whether new infrastructure has been procured.
Upgrading to the newer version brings competitive advantages, continual bug fixes and performance enhancements which will make the software entirely better, proving to add value to your investment.

The final say
Sitecore 9.2 upgrade can save you valuable time and aid collaboration between administrators. When you do not upgrade, you are risking accumulating old items that are unusable and distort the overall infrastructure. Sitecore is a highly flexible platform, which also means that there are numerous ways to design the underlying architecture for the same published result. If you are considering moving to Sitecore 9.2, our team of developers can help you with best practices to reap the true potential of the Sitecore platform.

Originally published at https://www.softwebsolutions.com on November 6, 2019.