Verint Community 14 represents a significant change to Community's architecture, affecting its installation, upgrade, and development process. Instead of installing Community directly onto a Windows server, Community now runs as a set of containers that can be deployed with Docker Compose or equivalent container tooling.
This makes Community 14 cross-platform, more scalable, portable across supported container runtimes on multiple architectures, and easier to keep consistent between local, test, and production-like environments.
The underlying architectural shifts necessary to accomplish this also improve performance and make customization upgrades safer and more reliable.
What's the same?
Coming from pre-14, what's the same:
- Core product concepts remain familiar, including groups, applications, content, users, permissions, notifications, moderation, UI, and reporting.
- The extensibility model continues to include APIs, webhooks, widgets, themes, automations, embeddables, emails, and plugins.
- Many scripted customizations, including themes, widgets, and automations, are expected to require little or no change.
- APIs remain split across the same target areas, including REST, scripted, and in-process with some changes.
- Community continues to use SQL Server and Solr.
What's New?
High level changes in 14:
- Migrated from .NET Framework 4.7 to cross-platform .NET 10
- Fully containerized and split into product images for separate components
- Plugin development is supported through NuGet templates and NuGet packages with a pre-configured Docker Compose stack with simplified deployment.
- In Verint's cloud environment, containerization in Kubernetes enables Community to automatically scale up and down in response to load
- New, layered, environment configuration enabling multiple configuration sources to configure the entire community down to individual plugins
- Deep observability support with OpenTelemetry
- Built-in, extensible, antivirus support
- Simplified and standardized language packs
- New file viewers with faster conversion pipelines for a broader set of image and document types
- Significant performance improvements on similar hardware
- Built-in request throttling
- Built-in manual and automatic maintenance page and preview access
- Built-in HTTP logging
- Improved emergency access
- Session-tracking and expiration
- A new bundled high performance caching and messaging service
- Significantly refactored or replaced subsystems around routing, serialization, messaging, caching, sockets, locking, content delivery, cloud file storage, admin panels, and more
- The migration from .NET Framework to .NET along with minor API changes necessitate one-time migration of plugins to the new format.
Runtime Shape
A typical Community 14 stack includes the following Community containers:
web: Serves Community HTTP traffic, replacing previous deployments ofTelligent.Evolution.Webapplications in IIS.job: Runs background processes, replacing the Job Server Windows Service.search: Pre-configured Solr instance with Community configuration.infra: Provides high performance messaging and distributed caching, replacing the Socket Message Bus and Redis.installer: Creates or upgrades databases and site configurations.
Most local examples also include dependency containers for SQL Server, telemetry, outbound email testing, and antivirus. These are convenience services for local or Compose-based deployments; production environments can replace them with externally managed services as needed.
Where to Start
- How do I get started with installation?: Stand up a quick local Community 14 stack using sample Compose and settings files.
- How do I install a production environment? : Use bind mounts, persistent host folders, antivirus, and deployment settings closer to a real environment.
- What container images make up Verint Community? : Review the purpose and runtime expectations for each Community container image.
- How do I upgrade from Verint Community 13 or earlier? : Migrate an existing pre-v14 Community site to 14.
- How do I upgrade from Verint Community 14 or later? : Move from one Community 14 release to a newer Community 14 release.
- Developing a Plugin: Scaffold and run a plugin development environment against released Community 14 packages.
- Migrate Plugins to Verint Community 14: Migrate a plugin from an older version of Community to Community 14.
- API Changes: List of API updates.
