Crownpeak strives to deliver the best product experiences that delight our customers and add value to their professional lives. To continually innovate and improve our products we must occasionally retire some of our older or less used features, products, and services. This gives us the opportunity to focus on providing the most modern and intuitive offerings possible.
As of January 31, 2021, we will be retiring the Volte UI, Search Classic platform, and our VB Template API.
You can find more information below about each platform and any impact the retirement may have on your Crownpeak configuration.
Volte UI Retirement - January 31, 2021
In 2012, Crownpeak introduced the Volte UI (Italian verb meaning to transform) leveraging Silverlight as the technology. Volte was embraced by our customers, and quickly replaced the Classic UI due to its intuitive interface and ease of use. A few years later in 2015, Microsoft announced the end-of-life for Silverlight and work immediately started at Crownpeak on a full replacement for Volte. V3 was introduced in 2016 as a fully responsive and customizable, web-based user experience, built with the latest web technologies and providing richer content management capabilities.
We understand that Volte continues to be a favorite for some of our users, but we assure you that V3 is better in every way. Here’s why:
- Volte requires Silverlight to be downloaded and installed. V3 is web-based, which means there is nothing to install or download.
- Volte imposes product downloads with every release that cause noticeable interruptions. V3 is version-less, meaning you’re always on the latest and greatest version.
- Volte relies on Silverlight which is no longer supported in any modern browser. Older browsers are more vulnerable to security threats as they do not receive security fixes from their providers. V3 works in top modern browsers such as Chrome and Safari.
- Volte no longer receives any product improvements or new capabilities. V3 introduces many new capabilities including inline editing and drag and drop, and is our main focus area for all performance improvements, powerful capabilities, and future innovation.
The great news is that V3 is already available for our Volte users. Simply enter the URL below (make sure to replace [cms_instance] with your instance name) in your favorite modern browser, and login using your current credentials.
https://cms.crownpeak.net/[cms_instance]/v3
Please contact your customer success manager or Crownpeak support if you have any questions, or concerns about V3 and/or Volte retirement.
Search Classic Retirement - January 31, 2021
Crownpeak has always offered a search solution alongside the CMS, in addition to other microservices such as Testing and Targeting, Form Processing capabilities, and more. Crownpeak’s Search Classic is a proprietary search solution that had evolved over the years to become a reliable platform that many of our customers used.
However, Search Classic has limitations that make it difficult to support multi-lingual experiences due to lack of support for non Latin-based character sets such as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. Crownpeak introduced Search G2 (the second generation of Search) as a service running on Solr and Lucene to overcome the Search Classic limitations. Search G2 improved upon classic and was built with Realtime Indexing, an option to receive content updates directly from the CMS at the time of publishing, eliminating the need for site crawling. This means that a site's search results will always be in sync with the published content.
Search Classic has not received product updates for years and is built on archaic technology that is no longer supportable, which translates to risk to any customer using the technology. The time has come to retire it so we can reduce those risks to our customers and focus on and innovate with Search G2.
If you are using Search Classic on your site, your customer success manager, in collaboration with our support and professional services teams, will be reaching out to you with a migration plan to move your Search Classic configuration to Search G2. In the meantime, please feel free to reach out to your customer success manager and/or support if you have any questions.
VB Template API Retirement - January 31, 2021
When Crownpeak was founded in 2001, the platform was launched with VB Script as the scripting language to configure templates. It was easy to use and provided some flexibility to create great digital experiences at the time. However, as technology advanced, VB became very limited and offered little to no upgrade paths for the platform, its scalability, and to our customers’ experiences.
A new templating API leveraging C# was introduced 10 years later, offering powerful development capabilities including object-oriented programming, code-reuse, and more. With the introduction of C# template, developers were offered a whole new world of possibilities.
The Crownpeak platform today supports both languages, which was important to ensure full support to older CMS configurations built with VB script. However, the VB codebase imposes constraints on the CMS that impact performance and scalability, and result in execution and out of memory errors. We have decided to completely remove support for VB Script from the platform so it can realize its full potential.
If you have any remaining VB Templates running in your CMS instance, your customer success manager, in collaboration with our support and professional services team will be reaching out to you with a migration plan to help you convert your VB templates to C#.
Crownpeak DXM - The Future
These retirement activities are important steps to prepare us all for an amazing future with Crownpeak. We're really excited about all the things we have planned for you, such as serverless deployments, AI-driven content management, pluggable integrations, and much more.
Thank you for being a part of our journey.
If you have any questions or need any further information, please contact us via your Customer Success Manager, Technical Account Manager, or Crownpeak Support team at https://community.crownpeak.com/t5/crmsupport/page; any of whom will be happy to help you.
Thank you,
The Crownpeak Product Team
