Richard-von-Weizsäcker Berufskolleg is a vocational school, located in western Germany. They offer a range of educational programs in the fields of Economy, Technology, Social and health care and more. We have performed consulting and Plone upgrade services to help the company Xo7 update client's existing Plone intranet/extranet from version 2.1 to the latest Plone version 4.3. Intranet was functional and secure (Plone provides security hotfixes even for old Plone versions), but the client wanted to gain speed improvements of the newest Plone version and access to the latest add-ons.

Due to fairly complex content structure and use of add-ons with specific approach to group collaboration and permissions, we decided to use the "classic" upgrade approach. With this approach the site is upgraded in steps: first from version 2.1 to 2.5, then from 2.5 to 3.3.6, and so on, until reaching the final version. This can work reasonably well, but in this case we faced several issues, mostly due to incomplete upgrade steps of some of the add-ons used. Next time we will probably consider other upgrade options using collective.transmogrifier or tools built on top of it, such as mr.migrator and collective.jsonmigrator. Using these tools the content is migrated directly from the original Plone site to the newest Plone version.

But in the end everything turned out fine, the client can now enjoy a faster and more user-friendly site, along with awesome add-ons, such as solgema.fullcalendar!