15 for 15: How to Upgrade

Analytics · By On · 5 Comments

As you can imag­ine, cus­tomer and com­mu­nity response about Site­Cat­a­lyst 15 has been tremen­dously pos­i­tive. Every­one is eager to upgrade as soon as pos­si­ble; and well…they should be. Did you notice that the num­ber of your Idea Exchange ideas we’ve imple­mented went from 42 to 101 with last week’s release? So, back to the ques­tion, what do you need to do before you upgrade? Read on.

Many of the new Site­Cat­a­lyst 15 fea­tures are pos­si­ble because of improve­ments to the way data is processed. On your upgrade date, your data is processed dif­fer­ently from that date for­ward. As a result, seg­men­ta­tion, Unique Vis­i­tor counts for arbi­trary time peri­ods, undu­pli­cated met­rics in clas­si­fi­ca­tions, and full sub­re­la­tions on all con­ver­sion reports (to name a few) will be avail­able from your upgrade date for­ward. If you run a report from before your upgrade date, you’ll see some­thing like this.

Message indicating some features are not available

With that back­drop, let’s talk about how to upgrade. Here are the steps.

1. Get more infor­ma­tion on v15. We’ve pro­vided an out­stand­ing (if I may say so myself) guide to walk you through the upgrade process. The Upgrade Guide is avail­able in Site­Cat­a­lyst under Help > What’s New > Site­Cat­a­lyst 15 Upgrade Guide. If you do noth­ing else today, read this (I mean the PDF, not this screen shot).

Page from the upgrade guide

2. Check with stake­hold­ers. Because we’ve improved the cal­cu­la­tion of cer­tain met­rics, those met­rics will change slightly as of your upgrade date. Check with a few key Site­Cat­a­lyst data con­sumers in your orga­ni­za­tion to iden­tify the best sea­son or month to take on those changes.

3. Notify your Account Man­ager. After you’ve read the doc­u­men­ta­tion and are ready to upgrade, let us know. Your AM can pro­vide an ini­tial assess­ment of whether you’re likely to upgrade in the next few months. Dur­ing the first few phases of upgrades, we’re look­ing for spe­cific types of cus­tomers, cus­tomers that we can ensure will have an excel­lent upgrade expe­ri­ence, and that will help us learn how to accel­er­ate the upgrade rate. If you’re not cur­rently a can­di­date, let your AM know that you’d like to upgrade as soon as an oppor­tu­nity arises. He or she will keep you on the upgrade list and notify you when a slot opens up. (You won’t need to check back reg­u­larly, as indi­cated in the orig­i­nal ver­sion of this post.)

We’re work­ing very care­fully to ensure that the upgrade to Site­Cat­a­lyst 15 is an excel­lent expe­ri­ence for every­one. We’ve had a very thor­ough beta, and now we’re keep­ing track of the first wave of cus­tomers to learn what can make the process bet­ter for other cus­tomers upgrad­ing. We’ll sand out any rough spots and grad­u­ally accel­er­ate the num­ber of cus­tomers who upgrade each month.

If you have any ques­tions, feel free to post them here or check with your AM.

  • Lucy G.

    Bret, can the new cal­cu­la­tion of the vis­its met­ric be retroac­tive? That is my biggest con­cern. If the new cal­cu­la­tion of vis­its changes so that it now includes the non-persistent cookie users this will affect our abil­ity to com­pare to pre­vi­ous date ranges.

    • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/bgundersen Bret Gun­der­sen

      Lucy,

      Great ques­tion. I’m glad you brought it up. The new cal­cu­la­tion of vis­its only applies from the upgrade date for­ward, so you’ll need to pre­pare your users for the increase in vis­its. There are a cou­ple com­mon workarounds, includ­ing using Report­Builder or Excel­Client to apply a per­cent increase to his­tor­i­cal num­bers so you can pub­lish a trend or year-over-year com­par­i­son. Addi­tion­ally, you could apply the “Vis­its with Vis­i­tor ID Cookie” seg­ment to a report to see what the vis­its met­ric would have been under the old calculation.

      Cus­tomers that have already upgraded are telling me that just inform­ing their 200+ con­sumers of the expected change was sufficient.

  • http://www.murdoch.edu.au Tim Elle­ston

    Hey Bret,
    Thanks for the post on this. To be hon­est, many cus­tomers are surely frus­trated by this process, espe­cially your Beta testers and CAB mem­bers, who, in many cases can­not upgrade for a vari­ety of rea­sons (not only from a busi­ness stand­point, but from an inte­gra­tion standpoint).

    We’re ready to upgrade, were part of the beta, sit on the CABs and yet we’ve been told we now have to wait between 6–12 months because we use SearchCenter.

    Surely it should be your cus­tomers deci­sion to upgrade or not, not a lim­i­ta­tion of the system.

    We’re extremely enthu­si­as­tic about the new fea­tures, but we can’t use them…for quite a while.

    Jason Egan summed it well in his com­ment on my frus­tra­tion post on my blog (http://​bit​.ly/​s​i​t​e​c​a​t15)…“it’ll be inter­est­ing what hap­pens to CAB mem­bers who can no longer con­tribute because they’re not on v15, and Sum­mit next year will be test­ing because many won’t have met the upgrade criteria.”

    Thanks
    Tim

  • http://www.sonomapartners.com//giganews microsoft crm

    I love the new Site­Cat­a­lyst 15. I have noth­ing but pos­i­tive things to say about it. I was so thrilled when I was able to finally upgrade. I really appre­ci­ate that you took our Idea Exchange ideas. You have done a great job with fig­ur­ing out a new way for the data to be processed. I am def­i­nitely impressed.

  • http://www.sonomapartners.com/ microsoft crm

    The cal­cu­la­tion is my biggest con­cern as well. I can’t wait for the new fea­tures. I’m sure that it will make life easier.