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Upgrade to Liferay 6.2
Hello,
Due to Liferay 6.1 EE getting out of support from FEB/2019 - our
client is considering a migration to Liferay 6.2 or DXP.
We
don't have all the expertise in house about Liferay migrations, as our
product is a legacy product where we basically offer
support/maintenance and our client is migrating to another product
from a different provider in the near future (probably around 1 year
from now).
So based on the fact, our product is in the
end-of-life, we strongly believe an update to Liferay DXP is not worth
- due to functional, differences and costs included on adapting all
customisations to the new version.
As we have never done a
Liferay migration before, we need some advice about how long it should
take and what would be the complexity on doing a migration from
Liferay 6.1 to Liferay 6.2. Our product has many customisations (ext,
hooks, portal-ext.properties) and we would need to have an upgrade
progress as simple as possible. (It's not in our - or even our client
- interest to spend months validating an upgrade for a product which
probably will be replaced within a year)
The main reason our
client is pushing for a Liferay upgrade is to be sure we will still be
able to apply security patches and keep the portal as protected as possible.
We would like to have your input about this upgrade and also would like to know if there is any other option to keep our product patched without upgrading to version after FEB/2019.
First, I think this is a question of your client replacing your software within a year, it has little to do with replacing Liferay outside of the fact that you built your solution on top of Liferay. If you have only been in a support/maintenance phase since you released on 6.1, there's hardly a guess as to why they would want something different; when you're delivering a product, you don't just deliver it and kick back collecting all of that sales revenue, you have to keep investing in the product to enhance features, improve usability, etc. Otherwise what seemed like a great package when you bought it eons ago will begin to feel stale and dated five years down the line.
Second, upgrading to 6.2 will require much of the same research, testing and analysis as going to 7.0 or 7.1, so don't assume that one is easier than the other. With 7.0 and 7.1, you at least get support in the Liferay IDE's Upgrade Assistant to help update your code, but this didn't exist for 6.1 => 6.2 so you'll need to take on that effort yourselves.
Third, there is no way to estimate time or effort based upon what context you have provided. When I estimate upgrades, I need to know 3 things:
- What is the size of the database (as in row counts in tables, not filesystem usage)?
- What is the level of customization (how many plugins are in play, if an EXT, how intrusive is it)?
- What is the scope (is it limited to an upgrade or will there be a lot of "while you're in there, can you just add/change/remove ..." requests)?
Without those details it is impossible to define how long an upgrade will take.