Upgrade from Neolane 6.1 to Adobe campaign - Howto?

[#1]

Hey guys!

New to the forum, and also to Adobe Campaign I'm more of a "CRM-person", and used to working with Salesforce and Dynamics CRM. When it comes to MA-tools I have some knowledge about Campaign monitor, Mailchimp, Apsis, Hubspot and Marketo. (And oh, I'm on the IT-side of things if that makes any difference)

Anyway - we're thinking about upgrading from Neolane 6.1 to Adobe Campaign, and I am wondering if someone could give me some advice? Has anyone here done it recently? Do's and dont's maybe? How big a project was it?

Thanks,

Daniel

PS. We have a setup of Dynamics CRM (2016 onprem) and Neolane today and they need to be tightly integrated.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi Daniel,

Complexity of upgrade would depend on your current implementation. If you use only (or almost only) OOTB configurations, upgrading from 6.10 to 6.11 can be very simple.

If you have implemented more custom features, it could require upgrading progressively from older builds to a more recent build. Best thing to do in that case would be to contact the support team, who frequently handles this.

Dynamics CRM 2016 is well supported since build 8687. The latest changes in the product regarding the integration with Dynamics were in build 8795, with additional connection methods added.

Hope this helps,

Florent

[#3]

• Determine services downtime by performing a test upgrade, probably by cloning the production environment on a virtualized system where you can perform snapshots and rollback with ease. Your clone must have the same/similar hardware specs to production.

• Take into account that some times, on big version upgrades, you may need to perform a 2-step upgrade, meaning that upgrading to the very latest version of a product some times is not possible, so you first attempt to upgrade to the first build of a newer version then to the latest build. (i.e. from Neolane 6.0.2 b6836 to 6.1.1 b8687 then whatever the latest build is) this is from experience.

• Think about business continuity (come up with a plan to keep partial/priority services up and running while the upgrade is happening. (could redirect traffic to a staging clone)

• Always keep full backup of the database(s) in case of upgrade failure and perform Rollback plan estimation

• Perform regression testing on clone environment, whereby you test all features (inc custom bestpoke features) pre-upgrade and post-upgrade to find out what can get broken and have patches ready in place to implement in the production environment.

Thats is on the top of my head from a technical point of view, if I have anything else to add I'll update.