51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ

Transcript

All right. All right, hi everyone again, and welcome to the 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ Commerce Upgrade Workshop in partnership with Merkle. I see we have a lot of people on the line today and more joining as we speak. We have a very full and informative session planned for today. So I’m gonna jump right in and get us started. This session is designed to be interactive, so we encourage you to ask questions in the question box on the GoToWebinar control panel throughout the presentation. Just type them in there, and we will do our best to answer as many of those for you when we reach Q&A. I wanna make a quick couple of mentions for housekeeping items before we get started.

We will be recording this webinar to be viewed on demand and shared with other members of your teams that may not be able to attend today. Audio is routed through your computer. Please ensure that your speakers are not muted. If you can hear me, you know you’re good to go. Our participants are in listen only mode, so please submit your questions by typing them in the chat box on the far right of your screen. We’ll have a couple of polling questions throughout the session. We encourage you all to participate as these will help drive future learning series. And as mentioned, we’ll also have a Q&A today. So please feel free to start asking throughout the presentation. If your question is not answered, please follow up with your customer success manager.

And lastly, at the end of the webinar, please complete the one question survey that will pop up on your screen so we can continue to deliver the best and most relevant information to you at these events. All right, next slide, please.

All right, so let’s jump into the agenda. The goal of this workshop is to help you with the planning, preparation, and executions of a commerce upgrade, understanding the importance of the UCT tool and how to leverage, tips, tricks, and best practices for upgrading. Next slide, please.

All right, onto introductions. We’ll start with the supporting facilitators who are here to answer your questions in the question pod throughout the session. My name is Yol-Ling Cort. I’ve worked in managed and cloud hosted services for over a decade in both technical and account management roles. After three years as a customer success manager for 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ Commerce, I’m now 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ Commerce’s strategy and operations manager who focuses on initiatives to improve merchant experience and satisfaction. Michelle Su is a product marketing manager on the 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ Commerce team who has focused on customer adoption and success over the last year. She has over seven years of marketing and communications experience and previously worked in the health industry before joining 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ.

Igor Satorenko is a lead technical architect for 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ Consulting Services in EMEA. He’s been with 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ Commerce for over 10 years and has curated and managed a variety of projects for merchants. He is passionate about pushing the boundaries and raising the technical bar for both his teams and his clients’ teams.

Sandra Gonzalez-Mangana is a senior product manager who has over 15 years of experience working in product. She focuses on initiatives that reduce total cost of ownership for 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ Commerce merchants. She is passionate about innovative and optimizing and is always looking for ways to iterate and improve upon products and their associated programs.

All right, so onto the star of this workshop, your main speaker, Ryan Street. Ryan is an 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ Commerce architect with over 10 years of experience with the platform. He holds certifications across both generations of the platform and has launched dozens of 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ Commerce sites. He currently works as a technical architect for Merkle, helping clients launch complex solutions on the 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ Commerce and 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ Commerce Cloud platforms. All right, so let’s kick this off. I’ll now hand this over to Ryan.

Thank you very much, I appreciate it. So welcome, everyone. Glad you could all join us today. Just as a quick reminder, may feel free to put any questions into the questions box for the QA at the end. But let’s go ahead and start into our upgrade workshop. So first of all, we’re gonna start off with a poll question. You’ll see that pop up on your screen here, and it’s, do you feel prepared to upgrade to 2.4.4? So just quickly select one of those options, really appreciate it. We’re gonna leave it up here for about 10 seconds or so, and then we’re gonna jump in here.

Okay, so thank you very much for those. Let’s go ahead and get into this. So first of all, all right, so why upgrade to 2.4.4? Depending on where you are, or if you’re considering the platform, you might be asking yourself this question, and sometimes the first thing that kind of pops into mind is well, you know, maybe I wanna get some more functionality or maybe I just wanna stay PCI compliant, but there’s actually a lot more to it that you wanna consider when you’re thinking about upgrading to the latest version of the platform. So when we think about this, you wanna think about this in three main pillars. We’re talking about future proofing, innovation and scalability. So with future proofing, we’re talking about leaning more on independent services versus core updates with the 2.4.4 version. This means fewer upgrade cycles. So now you’re not gonna have to worry and focus so much on upgrading all the time, so much as focusing on innovating for your platform, which comes into the second pillar, which is innovation. 2.4.4 has all kinds of great new innovations for commerce, including B2B commerce capabilities, merchandising, experience management, payment, cloud functionality, expanded GraphQL coverage and PWA studio enhancements. And then finally scalability. So there are new features available in 2.4.4 that help your site run faster. They handle things like larger catalogs and handle greater transactions through scale. Digging into this a little bit deeper, we have our future proofing, our innovation and our scalability. So when we’re talking about future proofing, we’re talking about upgrading less and innovating faster. There’s gonna be less frequent upgrades moving forward as of 2.4.4 and onward. They’re gonna be opting for more service-based features to keep your site secure, scalable and compliant. We’re also gonna be talking about innovating faster. So updates and new features will be delivered by a SaaS so your features will be available to you faster than through the normal upgrade process alone. So now instead of having to try and weigh, well, I wanna get this new feature that comes out, but I’m kind of far back in my upgrade process. Am I gonna have to try and balance, figure out whether or not I wanna go through the upgrade just to get to that new feature? With 2.4.4 and onward, most of the new updates and stuff will come mostly via the core. And all of the extra features and the innovations will come via SaaS. So you’ll be able to flip those proverbial switches, if you will, and get those innovations a lot faster than having to go through what can be sometimes be considered an arduous upgrade process. Then we talk about innovation. So we’re talking about better experiences. This is things like AI-powered product recommendations for personalized customer experience. GraphQL coverage for more admin and B2B functionality in the latest versions. PWA studio personalizations and promotions coverage. Now for all those people that are on headless out there. Also operational improvements. Asset and inventory management improvements, purchase approval workflow improvements, payment services. And then platform help. The SWOT tool or the Site-Wide Analysis tool and the Performance Monitoring Dashboard are also available to you. That you can get a quick holistic overview and a snapshot of exactly what the health of your site is, which will really help you decide and make business decisions going forward on how you want to maintain the health of your platform. Scalable and fast. So optimizing site performance and then also the benefits of PHP 8.1. And not just from a developer perspective. The developer features are great, but also the speed and stability that comes with PHP 8.1. More scalable and more stable. That’s what we want from our performance enhancements. So we are more scalable now in 2.4.4. You can process over five times the transaction volumes with our asynchronous order processing, which is a big increase. And then managing complex catalogs up to 10 times larger, excuse me, compared to previous versions. This is especially relevant to those with very large catalogs out there. Maybe you’re a B2B merchant or you’re a vendor helping out B2B. And you have catalogs that can range maybe in the millions. And sometimes you have to make certain sacrifices in order to facilitate a large catalog such as that while not sacrificing performance at the same time. Now we have the ability to leverage more features because you can have more complex catalogs over the previous versions. And then of course, more stable. You have a 32% improvement in site health index scores from our SWOT tool or a site-wide analysis tool as said before, and a 34% lower chance of experiencing site outages in 2.4 compared to 2.3. So let’s talk about planning your upgrade. Let’s talk about actually digging into what it’s gonna take for you to get from where you are to where you need to be. First of all, let’s take a look at the 2022 release calendar. There are a number of different key dates on here but there are two really important ones and those are those red dots there. September 8th of 2022 is the 2.3 EOS or end of service date, okay? As of 2.3 on September 8th, it is no longer going to be serviced or supported. Another important one is November 28th. The 240 to 243 end of service date hits on November 28th. So it’s very important to know that unless you’re on 244 right now, you started back in April or even in beta, you are going to reach an end of service date by sometime by the end of this year, okay? Now don’t get, you know, don’t get, you know, like crazy and upset or anything like, oh my gosh, I have to scramble and make all these adjustments and stuff like that. It’s not a problem because there are plenty of paths that you can take while still remaining PCI compliant and getting the latest security patches and there are plenty of options still available to you depending on your version to be able to perform this upgrade to 244, okay? So we have a couple of different recommended paths and options for you for depending on where you are to where you need to be. Now, there are different options depending upon your version, whether on your 2.3 branch or the 2.4 branch, there are pros and cons with each route and they will differ from, you know, client to client, merchant to merchant, or depending upon your specific circumstance. Having these different options available to you will help you plan out what the next year is going to look like for you, as well as level of effort, how you need to manage your teams, what kind of effort that you’re going to need to start to put together for this. So let’s talk about if you’re on 236 or lower, all right? You have two main options available to you that we recommend. You have the 236 lower, you have the ability to do two main things. So option A is you make what I call the big leap. This is when you go from one kind of major version to another major version. The big leap is basically option A where it’s where you start to work on getting to 244 right now. Essentially, you want to, you know, start to work and go through all the upgrade process necessary to just get to 244 now that it’s in general availability. Option B, depending upon certain circumstances, you might not want to take that option. So you have the ability to go to 237 patch two and then patch three and patch four. And then what you can do is offer what’s called extended support. Extended support is an additional service offered by 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ that extends for one year beyond the end of service date. And this allows, this gives you more time to be able to plan for your upgrade. Basically, it allows you to better facilitate depending upon your market needs, your budget, your resources, your capacity, to be able to decide when you’re going to make that big leap, if you will. Like I said, there are pros and cons to this. So if you decide to go with the patch route, you’re gonna delay access to future enhancements in 244. There’s a real cost associated with extended support. So that’s gonna cost you are going to accrue as you’re going through and going on the extended support route. Don’t forget that if you’re on the two, three branch and you’re going on the extended support route, that you have to talk to vendors and people who provide your third party modules because they might also be in end of service as well. And so you might have to talk about extended support options with them on top of the extended support from 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ. The level of effort is going to be higher since there’s gonna have more breaking changes between versions. This is what I talk about when I talk about the big leap. And so the longer you wait, the further out the versions are gonna be. So even the more effort is going to quote unquote pile up, if you will. Now, that’s not to say that this is a bad option. That’s just to say that these are the different pros and cons because there are plenty of valid reasons why you would want to go on something like the extended support route. Maybe your proverbial Christmas time is in the summer and you don’t want to do a major upgrade right in the middle of your peak season. Maybe you’ve already allocated things like budgets and efforts for the year and you don’t have any capacity left to be able to perform a major upgrade like this. That’s why the patch option and extended support option exists. This gives you flexibility to be able to choose the best time for you to get to 244.

All right, so what if you’re on 237? Okay, so 237, you follow the patch route and then you go to 244 or you have option B, which is to continue on the patch route and then go to maybe let’s say the 245 route, depending upon when you have the availability to do it. Once again, this all just goes into your budgets and your options, but basically you want to get essentially to 244 or later. Now, you might just go from a patch route as seen here with option B and then go to 245 or depending upon when you want to make the big leap, if you will, you might continue to stay on a patch route and then go through extended support. So 240 to 243, this is important because remember, the end of service date for 24 through 243 is in November of this year. So you need to start thinking about getting onto 244 and or 245 here very soon. So once again, get onto 244 now, if you have the availability, especially if this isn’t your peak season, you might want to consider going to 244 now. This isn’t going to be as big of a leap as the 23 branch to a 24 branch. I