Sitecore items migration process

2
votes

Recently we have upgraded a project from sitecore 6.5 to sitecore 8.0 update 5, and we are now in the process to go live, but we want to migrate the data from the live environment so we can deploy the upgraded site.

We always migrate the data by serializing the items in the content tree or creating sitecore packages. Is It safe to do this, specially we will move the items from sitecore 6.5 to 8, Any potential errors might happen? Are there another techniques we can use?

1
sitecore
This is very extensively discussed on the Sitecore community site see for example: community.sitecore.net/developers/f/5/p/336/1326#1326. About other content migration tools, some use Razl from Hedgehog. - Jan Bluemink
The link you shared is very helpful, I found these tips very helpful: My best recommendation would be to purchase Razl (its only $149) and do the following: i) Package all custom user roles from the 6.5 solution and push them to the 8 solution ii) Use a tool like SQL compare to bring across users. iii) turn off the history engine in sitecore by commenting it out from the database nodes in the web.config iv) Merge the system template changes back to a copy of the 6.5 db v) Use razl to migrate the data in the following order core db - Ahmad Harb

1 Answers

2
votes

I have taken this approach with an upgrade from 7.2 to 8.0 update 3 without any problems.

There was a change to the structure of the rules engine in 7.1, so if you are making use of rules in your content you might run in to a few problems. It's shouldn't break Sitecore completely, but you might have to reapply the rules.

While I'm quite comfortable with the content migration approach to upgrades, not everybody feels the same way. Here's a blog post that raises some concerns you might want to consider:

The Truth About Sitecore Upgrades