Valid upgrade path from 2011 SP1 HR1 to 2013

Question

I have an inline upgrade to do for a client moving from 2011 Sp1 Hr1 to 2013.

It has been mentioned to me that there may be a way to inline upgrade the Content Delivery side of the platform to 2013 while still having publishing working on a 2011 Content Manager.

It was mentioned that it might also be the other way round (Upgrade CM and still publish to 2011 CD) but I thought I would put this out there and see if anyone knows of this method and see if this was a valid upgrade path that can be achieved. If there is a way to do this would anyone be able to supply me some more information on how this can be done.

Answer 1

Actually, you can run a 2011 content manager on a 2013 content delivery. Documentation can be found here: http://sdllivecontent.sdl.com/LiveContent/web/pub.xql?action=home&pub=SDL_Tridion_2013&lang=en-US#addHistory=true&filename=StagedUpgradeSteps.xml&docid=concept_2F44AFBC950B4A5FA354DCF035B2524F&inner_id=&tid=&query=&scope=&resource=&eventType=lcContent.loadDocconcept_2F44AFBC950B4A5FA354DCF035B2524F

The 2013 deployers are backwards compatible with the 2011 publishing formats. You still have to upgrade DB + deployer + content delivery at the same time, and i am not really sure how usefull this really is.

Answer 2

I can't imagine that there is any supported way to run CM and CD on different versions.

For some of my implementations I have upgraded a copy of the CD side for testing, but I would strongly recommend a simultaneous switch of your CM and CD systems for a production environment.

All that said, this also really depends on what you are publishing. If you are just publishing static pages, you may be lucky, and successfully have a 2013 CM publish to a 2011 CD. If you are using any dynamic queries, broker functionality, smart target, New UI/SiteEdit, custom deployers/storage etc. you are probably asking for trouble.