No matter if you are a customer or a partner helping other customers or maybe a vendor providing solutions to others, what we all often see is that all the teams are focused on delivery of new features, new platforms, new websites, well defined milestones.  

When the go-live happens, and the dust goes down all of the involved teams with a feeling of well done job start to focus on the next goals set by the business or marketing teams.  

Everyone tends to forget that they now have a new tool that has to be maintained in a good shape to fulfill long-term goals, and they should not focus only on new deliveries but also reserve some time for maintenance, upgrades, and improvements.   

In this article I will share a few reasons why you should pay more attention to your XbK instance and why it benefits you and your business. 

New features 

Kentico heavily invests in Xperience by Kentico and number of releases they do every month is really impressive. Every month you can expect 3-5 new versions that provide security patches and new features. If you forget about doing upgrades, after a year you will be at least 30 versions behind which will make your upgrade process much more complex.  

The list of the latest releases is available here:  
https://docs.kentico.com/changelog 

 Why does Kentico release changes so often? Sean Wright shared with me the answer to this question – it is like that because Kentico Community preferred to run small upgrades more often than large upgrades two or three times a year. After doing some upgrades for one of our customers I must agree that it was a good choice – upgrades are easy and in most cases do not take much time. 

If you look at this also from the perspective of the licensing model and paid subscription, you decide to not run the upgrades you will be paying for your license without having all features available which does not make any sense. You should be using what you are paying for. It is worth noting that currently, you will see many changes being added to marketing automation and email campaigns – business users will for sure appreciate new features. 

Support and security 

Getting support in case something wrong happens is a very important factor in choosing enterprise software like Xperience by Kentico. Stakeholders pays for stability and security, if you delay your upgrades for too long, you will not be able to apply some of the security patches straight away when they are released – because you will need to upgrade to the latest available version first. It means that you environment will be vulnerable to attacks and you do not want that.  

Additionally, you have to be aware of the Kentico’s support policy that says: 

“The Customer is recommended to implement the hotfixes and updates of the Service on regular basis. Notwithstanding the previous sentence, the Customer is obliged to implement the updates of the Service at least once a year, always by 31st October of the given year.” 

If you do not follow these guidelines you may need to ask for premium support. You can read more about it here:  

https://www.kentico.com/getattachment/e7382fad-8431-44bc-9c75-1d7d64112cee/Xperience-by-Kentico-Terms-of-Service-cloud.pdf 

Your team digital maturity 

Term of a digital maturity is usually used to describe maturity of the marketing team in terms expertise in using available tools and channels. Xperience by Kentico is not only a CMS, it provides also marketing automation, email marketing features, APIs that can be consumed in Omnichannel, especially when you use Content Hub and you are familiar with modular content concept.  

Should we limit it to marketing teams only? I would add to ‘the team’ also technology teams enabling and configuring features that are available, because every member of the whole team has to understand why & how something is useful to get maximum out of it. While developer teams work on the upgrades and regularly go through release notes, they better understand what can be provided to the marketing team and how to make it useful for everyone.  

It is much easier to embrace a short list on new addons than the list growing for a year or longer. Giving up on upgrades limits then not only the technology part but also the marketing and business side of your company. 

Summary 

I hope that now you all understand why keeping software up to date is in our common interest. At the point of time, you decide to go the enterprise-level path and make your organization better than others, you have to remember about growing not only on the technical but also organizational part.  

Become mature and improve as often as possible on all levels.