May '23 Office Hours Recap
Our May office hours focused on Sugar Professional to Enterprise conversions and strategies for upgrading from old to the latest Sugar versions.
Session Highlights
We kicked off the session with a good discussion about the process of converting from Sugar Professional to Enterprise. One of the takeaways from that was the importance of reconsidering any customizations done on Professional as you move to Enterprise. For example, Sugar Enterprise comes with new features like SugarBPM which could be used as an alternative to a custom-coded logic hook.
Next, the discussion moved on to upgrading Sugar. If you are on an old version of Sugar, upgrading to the latest will involve multiple "hops" between intermediate versions before you get to the latest. While upgrading, it's important to update your supporting platforms (PHP version, MySQL version, etc.) along the way so that you're always using the supported stack for the Sugar versions you are upgrading. Changing supported platform versions is time-consuming so using Docker containers or virtual machines is very useful.
There's also a wealth of documentation available on the Sugar Support site such as Healthcheck Output documentation. The chances are you will be referring to this frequently during these upgrades.
Near the end, we started a discussion about using Rector to help you automatically keep your PHP code up to date with the latest PHP versions supported by Sugar. We mentioned the new Automated PHP Compatibility section in the Dev Club. We did run out of time so we expect to cover this topic in more depth in an upcoming Office Hours.
And finally, throughout the session, the point was reiterated that it's also very important to make backups and have a rollback plan if something goes wrong. Never try something for the first time in your production environments!
Special Thanks
Many thanks to Angel Magana, Principal Technical Account Manager, and Odin Cisneros, Technical Account Manager - LATAM, for joining us to share their experience and thoughts on navigating complex Sugar conversions and upgrades.
Session Recording
This session was recorded on May 3rd, see here for the recording and here for the slides.
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