Sitecore Content Hub users are about to get a really exciting change following upgrade to 4.2.

Upgrades will be automatic in the future

I first heard about this a few months ago from some of the Sitecore team. Content Hub upgrades are much simpler than the platform DXP and generally uneventful.

However depending on how long you leave it between upgrades it can get more complicated.

So I reached out to some of the product team at Sitecore as I wanted to make sure what I was hearing was correct. The team were great and supplied me with the following.

What does Sitecore want to achieve?

Moving to a true Saas model, where release management moves to the background, just like it does for Miro or Google drive, so Sitecore customers do not have to go through heavy effort upgrades like in the past.

Customers should continuously benefit from the improvements made to the product and reduce the risk of for customers going from an old version to the latest, where it is harder to foresee how that can potentially impact the customer. This is a more sustainable way of working, for Sitecore, partners, and customers.

My thoughts

Customers will see the benefits of new features much quicker. Now they have some choice and can be flexible in when to or not to do upgrades.

Sitecore support have a reduced number of versions to deal with. Support currently have a number of versions to support which probably can cause issues. With this approach it means everyone is running a similar version.

Security patches can be rolled quickly. Depending on the issue Sitevore could patch quickly across all customers keeping their customers secure.

What should everyone be mindful of?

Content Hub customers are used to a partial SaaS model that is currently in place. They get a choice on upgrades and when or when not to do them. Going full SaaS means Sitecore has more control and the customer less. Honestly I think it’s a good thing and will make less overhead for customers that has complex upgrade schedules.

I love the flexibility of Content Hub and how simple you can build custom logic. It’s a great selling point and is what makes it exciting to work with. Technically the more custom logic you have might mean a big increase in testing after each upgrade. It’s just something to be mindful of and maybe will be fine.

The last point to be mindful of is the rollback procedure. If upgrades are happening every few weeks customer’s will need to have a plan for testing each release.

Sitecore did provide the following additional information on Rollback –

“Regarding the rollback, when a bug is found, we plan to fix it in the following version, for every client. Sometimes in the future, these versions may vary in frequency, to contain any relevant fixes and improvements.”

“This also means that it may be beneficial for clients and partners to move away from testing things in every release in favour of putting together a test plan at a defined frequency, unrelated to the releases themselves, to ensure that the custom logic still works as expected.”

“If issues are found in sure support can pause a release but customers will have to actively resolve issues quickly.”

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I think this is an interesting change for Content Hub customers. You will always be on the most stable, secure and best version.

Let’s see what the next few months bring and hopefully easier upgrades.