Over the years I have performed numerous Sage CRM (including Sage 200 CRM) upgrades and have frequently come across the following situation. The client will be running an older server O/S, for instance Windows Server 2016. On that server they will also be running the latest release of Sage CRM which is supported on that server, for example Sage CRM 2022 R1.
Sage CRM Version | Windows Server | ||
2016 | 2019 | 2022 | |
2022 R1 | X | X | |
2022 R2 | X | X | |
2023 R1 | X | X | |
2023 R2 | X | X |
We encourage our clients to take regular upgrades, although it can be difficult to persuade them as an upgrade involves downtime and cost, both in terms of our time to perform the upgrade and in many circumstances a cost to upgrade their server to be compatible with the latest release of Sage CRM. It should be possible to perform a direct upgrade from Sage CRM 2022 R1 to 2023 R2, no longtail upgrade required
You can use the Sage CRM 2023 R2 installation package to upgrade from versions 2023 R1, 2022 R2, 2022 R1, 2021 R2, and 2021 R1.
If a client is running Sage CRM 2022 R1 on Windows Server 2016 we would advise them to purchase a new server to run Sage CRM 2023 R2. The client would then opt for Windows Server 2022 as this is the latest release of Windows Server. However, In this situation there is no common server O/S support for both Sage CRM 2022 R1 and 2023 R2, even though a direct upgrade is supported. As Sage CRM upgrades require an in place upgrade in order to upgrade the data either the current installation has to be upgraded and the data transferred to the new server or Sage CRM 2022 R1 has to be installed onto the new server, the data restored and then upgraded. Neither of these options is supported.
The only supported mechanism is to have an intermediary upgrade server running Windows Server 2019. So the upgrade process is
- Install Sage CRM 2022 R1 onto an intermediary server running Windows Server 2019
- Restore the Sage CRM data onto the intermediary server
- Perform the upgrade from Sage CRM 2022 R1 to 2023 R2 on the intermediary
- Install Sage CRM 2023 R2 onto the Windows Server 2022 environment
- Restore the data from the intermediary server onto the Windows Server 2022 environment
The result of this is that an upgrade from Sage CRM 2022 R1 to 2023 R2 becomes quite a major project. Any thoughts on this process and how to make it more efficient would be most welcome.
With other applications, for instance Sage 200, the process would be to install the latest release on the Windows Server 2022 environment, restore the data from the previous system into the environment and then upgrade it. No intermediary server required, even if there is no commonly supported server O/S between the versions.