Are you looking to streamline your company’s digital operations to improve your business? Now is the best time to upgrade or migrate to Xperience by Kentico (XbyK) for all your content management, marketing automation, personalization and ecommerce needs. XbyK makes it easy for businesses to create personalized customer experiences across multiple channels while managing everything from a single platform hosted on-premises or in the cloud. XbyK is an easy-to-use solution for modern websites and integrates seamlessly into any technology stack. XbyK empowers companies and brands to increase customer engagement, deliver personalized content to the right audience, and optimize performance to win more clients. Its advanced capabilities, short time to value, and ease of use are backed by market-leading support.
Also, there are great new opportunities through Kentico’s SaaS licensing program. The XbyK SaaS service offers hosting, infrastructure, and other services that help to reduce IT overhead. It also includes automated deployments for Kentico’s regular monthly updates (product refreshes / hotfixes), simplified deployment processes for all other code updates, the ability to schedule Production deployments, regular database backups and extensive security features. The SaaS service leverages Azure components, best-of-breed third-party services, and Kentico’s management and automation capabilities to provide clients with operational control of cloud environments. If private hosting is preferred, Kentico still offers the standard private cloud licensing option for companies that prefer to manage their infrastructure directly. We can help you determine which option is best for your organization.
No matter which platform you’re currently on, there are many benefits to switching to Xperience by Kentico.
- Upgrade from Kentico 13 (or older)
- Kentico Xperience 13 will no longer be supported after December 31, 2026. This means that after this date, Kentico will no longer provide technical support, updates, or security patches for Xperience 13. This is based on Kentico’s product support lifecycle policy. Older versions of Kentico have already passed their end of support dates. If you’re running on Kentico 13 or older then now is the best time to upgrade to Xperience by Kentico.
- Migrate to Kentico from another platform
- Why migrate to XbyK from another platform? Kentico is the award-winning digital experience platform that combines content management, digital marketing, and commerce. Available on-premises or in the cloud, Kentico is an easy-to-use solution for modern websites. We are Gold Partners with Kentico and have extensive experience with Kentico development and platform migrations to Kentico.
Upgrading or Migrating to Xperience by Kentico
Planning Phase
Whether you’re upgrading from an older version of Kentico or migrating from a different platform, it’s important to understand your existing content, information architecture and digital experiences before starting an upgrade or migration project. It’s also a great time to explore new opportunities for the overall layout, design and user experiences across your channels.
- Content Auditing: By applying a thorough content review and analysis we’re able to understand how content is currently stored and structured. Partnering with business teams we then determine what content and functionality needs to be moved into the new XbyK solution and what can be left behind. This is also the ideal time to determine how content should be migrated and possibly transformed into better, more reusable content structures in XbyK. With these critical details documented we’re able to develop a plan for successfully automating the content migration process utilizing the Xperience by Kentico Migration Toolkit.
- Digital Experiences / Personalization: An upgrade or platform migration to XbyK is the ideal time to consider improvements to the overall user experience. The content personalization and digital marketing features available in XbyK empower companies and brands to increase customer engagement, deliver personalized content to the right audience, and optimize performance to win more clients. Before starting the move to XbyK we work with clients to identify new digital marketing opportunities and determine the best strategy going forward.
- Front-end Layout & Design: This is also the ideal time to consider updates or major changes to any legacy layout and design components. XbyK makes it easy to integrate any front-end tech (Bootstrap, React.js, Vue.js, etc.) into the presentation layer to display your content. In most cases it’s recommended to select a predefined template and customize it to fit specific business and brand needs. We can help you through the entire process to make the best long-term design decisions before developing a new XbyK solution.
- Private-Cloud or SaaS Licensing? The answer to this will depend on your business needs and preferences. There are many benefits to the SaaS services and features whereas the Private-Cloud license provides the flexibility to directly manage hosting for XbyK. Contact us to find out how to determine which license option is best for you.
Content Migration
Whether you’re coming from a different platform or an older version of Kentico the first step is to create a boilerplate XbyK project to begin the migration process. Using the content migration & transformation plan from the previous phase we then migrate the legacy data and content into the fresh XbyK instance. This is done using the Kentico Migration Toolkit which is a collection of tools developed and supported by Kentico. The Migration Toolkit simplifies the content migration to XbyK and can be customized as needed to meet content type and structure requirements or limitations from legacy systems.
Development
Once the content migration is complete we start developing and configuring the front-end presentation layer. This can be done with a custom design or easily integrated with a front-end framework or library such as Bootstrap, React.js, Vue.js, or others. Development of the new layout & design will be based on requirements and brand standards that were defined in the previous phase.
The next step would be to manually transfer any code, third-party integrations, customizations, or other unsupported content into XbyK’s architecture and API. The amount of effort for this step depends on the complexity of your current platform and architecture. Contact us to learn what a migration to XbyK might look like for your company.
Launch
Once all the content and data have been migrated, the front-end designs have been built and all customizations have been implemented it’s time to prepare for deployment. The specific deployment process will depend on the hosting environment and licensing choice from the planning phase (Private-Cloud or SaaS License). Generally there is at least a QA (or Staging) environment as well as a Production environment. The QA environment can be used to test and confirm everything is working correctly before officially launching the new XbyK instance.
Let's build a great digital experience together!
Kentico is the award-winning digital experience platform that combines content management, digital marketing, and commerce, in the cloud and on-premises. If your current website or other content channels are outdated or need improvement then it’s time to consider switching to Xperience by Kentico. We are Kentico Gold Partners with years of experience building solutions in Kentico and helping clients migrate from other platforms. Contact us to learn more about our process and how we can help you benefit from Kentico’s advanced capabilities, short time to value, ease of use and market-leading support.