Royal College of Surgeons
Sitecore Upgrade
The Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) is an independent professional body and registered charity that promotes and advances standards of surgical care for patients and regulates surgery and dentistry in England and Wales. They provide education and assessment to nearly 30,000 surgeons and dental surgeons at all stages of their careers.
The Challenge
RCS faced a significant challenge with their existing technology stack; Sitecore XP version 8.1 and Ucommerce version 4. Sitecore version 8 was reaching end of support, which would open RCS up to security and compliance risks. Furthermore, Sitecore 8.1 was becoming slow and had numerous bugs for which only major rework could ameliorate the problem.
RCS sought our expertise to upgrade their site to a more supported version, and ensure security and safety.
The Approach
ClerksWell's recommendation was to upgrade to Sitecore 10.2, downscaling to an XM topology and to the latest version of Ucommerce. The aim was to maintain functionality and refactor any code which was not compatible with version 10, as well as transition from Lucene to Solr for search indexing.
The Ucommerce component also saw a major update, moving from version 4 to the newly released version 9.7. ClerksWell and Ucommerce worked collaboratively to troubleshoot teething problems and ensure the new version worked harmoniously with Sitecore version 10. We implemented Elastic search with Redis caching to provide an updated search experience.
The Impact
- Compliant and effective site on Sitecore v.10
- Smooth go-live, working with Ucommerce
The RCS website is now more robust and better equipped to meet all user needs, after a smooth go-live process working with Ucommerce.
Future surgeons who rely on the platform for educational resources can still access exams and other essential content effectively. This ensures that the RCS continues to meet its mission of supporting the surgical community now and into the future.
I've seen some absolutely fantastic work by your QA guys on this. I'm personally disappointed by how few bugs I've been able to raise.
James Pearson Jadwat | Digital Manager of RCS
