By: Raoul Miller - Enterprise Architect
Many of our clients have been concerned about upgrading / migrating from earlier Stellent versions to the current WebCenter Content release. While the underlying application architecture has changed quite a lot since the 7.x versions of Stellent, the core functionality has not. This is one of the great advantages of the service-oriented approach pioneered by Stellent and its robust component architecture.
Where there has been some confusion, though, is around what steps may be required to upgrade or migrate from older versions of Stellent to WCC 11g. I recently worked with a large client in the financial services industry who was in this situation – they had a Stellent 7.1.1 instance humming along quite nicely with millions of content items and Verity indexing. It was now time to upgrade to new hardware and the current version of WebCenter Content, but they (and we) needed to determine whether we had to update the existing instance before archiving content and taking a CMU bundle of the configuration. In particular, we knew that there had been a database schema change with the 7.5 release and there were thoughts that we might need to upgrade the 7.1.1 instances to 7.5 before archiving for import to 11g.
Fortunately for all involved, I can confirm that this step is NOT required. I created a test instance of Stellent 7.1.1 and was able to archive content and CMU bundles right out of that and import both successfully into an 11g instance with no errors at all.
We will still need to help our client with security and component migration, and they will be using this migration as an opportunity to review their metadata and purge some old revisions from their collection – and we would recommend that everyone in a similar situation do the same. But if you are running Stellent 7.1, 7.5, or UCM 10gR3 and plan on archiving content and migrating configuration to a newly installed 11g instance, there are no interim upgrade steps required.