Getting Clients To Upgrade To Revo

Now that Revo has officially been released I thought it would be in my client’s best interest to upgrade their Evo sites to Revo, but I’ve ran into a couple of problems and I thought I’d see how other people deal with them.

I start off by proposing a new project phase in which we upgrade the site to Revo, the upgrade would require an entire project phase rather than a few hours because its more than a standard security patch, it upgrade may require some snippets to be updated, all the site’s tags and placeholders will need to be updated, etc.

These are the sort of responses I’ve been getting:

• We’ve only just launched the website and now we need to upgrade the backend, why didn’t you tell us sooner so we could wait for Revo and save some money here?
• We don’t have much of a choice do we since not upgrading will mean our site will lack certain features
• We’re not interested in changing the backend interface thanks, we’ll stick with version 1.x.x
• The backend rebuild is new right? We’ll wait because it’ll probably be buggy

At the moment it generally seems they don’t see the upsides but instead it seems I’m trying to get a quick buck - almost like "if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it!" attitude

So what kind of responses have you guys been getting when suggesting the upgrade to Revo?

Our company won’t be upgrading any of our sites as there’s no need. Evo is still secure and will continue to be available and supported for a long time to come.

I have however started building new client sites in Revo, not because of extra features etc but because it’s the latest release and can be upgraded if required.

Personally I wouldn’t upgrade any evo sites unless they needed a feature that was only available in Revo

I’m not upgrading any clients either. There’s no reason to at this point. If they ask for a feature that is only available in Revo, maybe then. But there’s not a good reason to upgrade clients if their site was built with evo and they’re fine with it.

At some point, there will be a smoother upgrade path from Evo to Revo. I’d hesitate to make the switch at this point because it would involve a lot of cutting and pasting and possibly some down-time while you work out the new security settings and convert to new snippets (e.g., getResouces and FormIt). If you need selling points, though the ability to move the core out of reach of a browser is a major security improvement and people can be much more productive in the Revo manager (and it can be easily customized for each user’s needs). You can also be a lot more productive in Revo (which means less cost for the client) because of the improved UI and the power of xPDO.

I’m tempted to convert some client sites for free (if they’re clients that often want new features), just because it’s so much easier to accomplish certain things in Revo that Evo often feels like walking in deep sand to me.

IMO:
REVO = F-22 Raptor
EVO = F-16 Fighting Falcon