NEAMB
A Sitecore Upgrade in Half the Time
The National Education Association Member Benefits (NEAMB), a subsidiary of the National Education Association (NEA), offers discounts and benefits on travel, insurance, finance, and more for teachers.
- Services
- DevOps
- Development
- Enhance & Maintain
- Technologies
- Sitecore 10.3
- Visual Studio 2022
- Octopus
- Jenkins
NEAMB's Sitecore upgrade was made faster and much less painful using Oshyn's exclusive process and tools.
The Challenge
The National Education Association Member Benefits (NEAMB), a National Education Association (NEA) subsidiary, provides teachers exclusive discounts and benefits on travel, insurance, finance, and more.
NEAMB has been a long-time Oshyn client and Sitecore customer. With support for Sitecore XP 10.1 ending in December 2023, NEAMB needed to upgrade to the latest version of Sitecore XP 10.3 to continue powering its digital marketing efforts. Oshyn was consulted to help with the upgrade and perform additional content migration requirements.
The Solution
Oshyn initially assessed the Sitecore support requirements and the potential risks involved in the upgrade.
With support for the existing version of Sitecore ending soon, Oshyn and the NEAMB team collaborated to define a schedule for the upgrade using the existing Wave team and the continued development approach they had relied on for previous projects. This would allow the upgrade to happen during a typical low season for the business and have a minimal impact on ongoing business requests from the NEAMB team.
Additionally, Oshyn used its proprietary Sitecore upgrade tools to streamline the upgrade to Sitecore 10.3. As this wasn’t the first time NEAMB performed an upgrade, it was completed faster and with fewer errors using these tools.
Oshyn coordinated a two-day content freeze to facilitate the upgrade and migrate content assets to the new version of Sitecore. This shortened freeze window was made possible by Oshyn’s repeatable upgrade process and tools, which allowed the NEAMB to avoid pausing ongoing marketing campaigns for an extended period.
As part of the upgrade, Oshyn built new QA and production environments for the development team and implemented an updated deployment process in Jenkins and Octopus that would allow developers to roll out applications faster.
They also created Lambda functions to shut down idle AWS resources when not in use to optimize costs. These developments and previous DevOps work completed for NEAMB would allow Oshyn to reduce upgrade costs by 30%.
The Outcome
NEAMB successfully upgraded to Sitecore 10.3 and continues to receive ongoing Sitecore support. Oshyn performed the upgrade in five weeks instead of the typical nine weeks, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Just wanted to take a moment and thank each one of you that was involved in this Sitecore version upgrade… and I will say that it was definitely a very smooth undertaking … thanks to the meticulous planning, execution & testing of both MB & Oshyn team members.
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