Updating to Version 13 - what advise is available?

Hi Marie.Cassidy 

Great question! We have gone through a couple of upgrades now from V12 to V13. Upgrading to a new version can be a significant transition. Here are the key points and advice based on the upgrades we have done so far from Version 12 to Version 13:

1. Review Release Notes: Start by thoroughly reviewing the release notes for Version 13. This will give you insight into new features, improvements, and any deprecations. Pay special attention to any breaking changes that might affect your current setup.

2. Compatibility Check: Ensure that all your existing integrations, plugins, and customizations are compatible with Version 13. Sometimes, third-party components may need updates or replacements.

   1. Also - take an inventory of all customizations you have. Especially emails - as there will be a brand new email process - the Email Studio.
3. For a seamless transition, you might find it beneficial to have experts handle the upgrade process. Our team offers specialized upgrade services to ensure everything goes smoothly and to address any specific needs or concerns you might have.

If you have any specific questions or concerns - or need assistance, please feel free to reach out!

Sara

Thanks Sara Collins , appreciate the feedback.

With some major issues resolved in Version 13, the sooner we can move to 13 the better. Whilst, a seamless transition would be ideal, for many reasons we are planning to handle the upgrade process in-house, hence the call out to community managers who have completed the process.

Outside of the email studio, I take it that the biggest challenge or questions on upgrading relies on the level of customisation.

Are you hosted, or on-prem? We have local dev PCs, a vanilla environment, and dev, staging & production servers. We upgrade vanilla first, then local PCs, then move through the environments following a release process. We'll backup the environments (or have snapshots to go back to), as well as often running a load test on the staging env (esp for major version upgrades) before it goes to production.

Like you mentioned yourself, the level of customisation has a lot to do with how smooth it'll be. I hear v13 isn't too bad if you're upgrading from v12.

Please also take inventory of any customizations you may have to your master email template/ any emails in your community. When migrating to email studio - the layout of the email changes - which may require you to rethink/rework your customizations.