When maintaining your Web Forms based Portal Engine applications, sooner or later, there will come a time when you will need to decide whether to upgrade to the latest version that supports Portal Engine or to take the leap and migrate over to MVC.
Kentico 12 is the last version of Kentico Xperience (formerly Kentico EMS), which supports the Web part based Portal Engine development model. This development approach has been built on Web Forms technology, which has since been considered obsolete and is no longer maintained by Microsoft.
Because of this, Kentico 12 will benefit from an extended support period, which will guarantee the availability of the Portal Engine support for the next three major Kentico Xperience releases until at least 2023.
As the technology used by Kentico for Portal Engine is completely different from MVC, there is no direct upgrade path from Portal Engine to MVC. The front-end Portal Engine Web parts need to be rebuilt as MVC Views and Widgets in a brand new Kentico Xperience installation to ensure the familiar drag-and-drop based experience. Along with a front-end rebuild, the content will need to be migrated to newly defined Pages (for example, using the Kentico Import Toolkit).
To help you decide whether to upgrade or migrate, we have expanded the scope of the Pre-upgrade audit service to also include extensive information about what needs to be migrated, how it can be migrated, and what potential issues should be addressed to ensure a successful migration.
This can be particularly useful for those who have not yet decided between upgrading and migrating, but also for those who are already set on migrating to MVC and would like to get all the relevant information from a single service tailored to their project.
The MVC Migration report summarizes different areas of your Kentico Xperience project. It contains recommendations and the best practices you should follow to ensure that your customizations will be maintained after upgrading.
The report summarizes the current state of the web application and outlines the necessary steps to upgrade server-side customizations, such as integrations, scheduled tasks, and providers, and the steps necessary to migrate front-end components to MVC.
Based on the results of the audit performed by a Kentico Solution Architect, the report identifies areas of your Kentico Xperience project that you should pay attention to, along with a list of actions you should take to ready your solution for future upgrades. The report contains general information on certain areas plus project-specific recommendations. Each area is discussed in a separate chapter of the document.
To find out more or to book an MVC Migration audit, visit the Pre-upgrade audit service.