• Performance – We have seen significant improvements in multiple areas.
• Cross Platform Support – Allowing for hosting and development on different OS.
• Easier Development Process – Improved config management, dependency injection, lesser lines of code, and portable libraries.
• Modern Tech – Microsoft released .NET Core in 2016 to support portability and a unified approach when it comes to implementing for different machines such as Web, Windows Desktop/Store/Phone, etc.
• Open Source – Transparency and abundance of support allowing the community to participate and have faster release cycles.
• And many more as newer versions are released.

It’s long been a request to enable developer teams to work natively on both Windows and MacOS depending on personal preferences. With CMS 12 and Commerce 14 running on ASP.NET Core it’s much easier to share a single code base, but across different editors and operating systems.

Optimizely continues to migrate its add-on packages to ASP.NET Core and will continue to do so for future versions as well. See Optimizely apps and integrations for the migration status of the packages.

As Optimizely releases the ASP.NET Core code base, plugins and add-ons are dependent on their creators to ensure that they are compatible with the new version. Contact the creator of the plugins/add-ons you are interested in for more information. 

The first version of the packages were released on September 28, 2021 and are available on our NuGet feed (CMS and Commerce), with newer versions being continuously released. You can find sample codes on GitHub.

Our documentation have been updated for the ASP.NET Core code base and can be found here (CMS and Commerce). Here are a few topics to help you get started on learning about our some of the important changes:

• Getting Started
• Dependency Injection
• Configuration
• Logging API

For upgrading to Content Management (CMS 12):

• Why upgrade to Content Management?
• Upgrading to Content Management
• Breaking changes in Content Management (CMS 12)
• Upgrade Assistant

The Upgrade Assistant tool can help automate the transition from a CMS 11 project to CMS 12. Although the tool does help with the common tasks related to the migration, expect that there will still be some manual migration tasks that need to be performed. The move to ASP.NET Core also requires some changes to the PaaS environments for existing customers. Self-service tooling for transitioning to a ASP.NET Core environment is also available.

Our intent is to have no breaking changes, however see Breaking changes in Content Management (CMS 12) for changes when you upgrade.

Version 12 of Optimizely Content Management and version 14 of Optimizely B2C Commerce is now released. If you are interested in accessing, please contact your customer success manager or account manager for more details.

The upgrade will not be the same as before

• Upgrading to ASP.NET Core will require a brand new environment for your DXP. Optimizely will be providing this to you at no additional cost to your license
• Your code will need to be migrated from your existing code base to ASP.NET Core. Optimizely has built developer-facing tools to help run this process. This will require interaction from your development team

• Does it require recoding everything? – No, but it will require a migration of your existing code to the new code base
• Does it affect the data? – No, your data should not be affected
• Does it affect any existing integrations? – no, but you should run your new instance through UAT testing to assure that the code migration did not break any custom integrations
• Does it support any plug-ins/addons? – yes, new plug-ins or add-ons will need to be installed and configured

Yes - unless you fall under one of the scenarios:

• Upgrade from private cloud to public cloud (server bound to instance bound)
• Upgrade from either of the above to our cloud service.

Please reach out to your Customer Success Manager for details.

All new instances of our CMS and Commerce platforms will be:

• Provisioned in a new Linux environment
• Optimized for our version 12 (ASP.NET Core) application

Yes – please contact your onboarding manager OR account executive to discuss options to have your instance and site provisioned in preparation for ASP.NET Core.

• No – however this could represent an update to the existing application that your developers should review before starting your project
• As well, if there are key connectors/add-ons that are required for your project, we are migrating over these external tools as quickly as we can. If any are not ready for your project, we can provide a timeline on when these will be ready