Many businesses are now doing exceptionally well with Magento Enterprise edition. Gone are those days when the community edition ruled Magento development industry due to no obvious advantages of enterprise edition. Now, the popularity of enterprise edition is gaining momentum and finding wider acceptability because of improved architecture, multi-storefront approaches, higher scalability and greater speed of Magento development. When websites drive in more traffic, it becomes inevitable to ensure better management of the infrastructure by the means of some top-notch feature-rich framework. The enterprise edition of Magento fulfills all such needs that make businesses to opt for an instant up-gradation. However, like all migration projects, the Magento up-gradation from community edition to enterprise edition also involves some risks and challenges that need to be considered and mitigated during the process. We have listed some common challenges that you may face during your planned upgradation.

1. Budget:

Magneto community edition is an excellent solution for businesses with a small and fixed budget. If businesses cannot afford to purchase the license of the powerful enterprise edition of Magento, the open-source free alternative of it, the community edition, proves to be a boon in that case. So while moving your system to the enterprise edition, pricing can stand between you and the upgrade as a major challenge. So, you should thoroughly research and make an effective plan for your upgradation by taking into account all the costs likely to be incurred for hosting, extensions, customizations, applications integration and so on. All the costs you are going to bear for this movement should be worth of all the efforts you are putting into it. That should fulfill all the business requirements.

2. Technical Support:

When you are moving from the community edition to the enterprise edition, you would definitely be requiring expert technical support for initial installation and configurations, troubleshooting of issues. So getting proper timely help from Magento also emerges as another challenge. The Magento enterprise edition license also includes vendor support from Magento that covers all the technical support from initial installation to future bug fixes, patch installations and case resolution. If you are looking forward to reducing the workload on your in-house IT department, acquiring a license for Magento enterprise edition would make it possible.

Magento also provides the license acquirer with a well-documented knowledge base. It includes several educational documents, tutorials, and materials on best practices.

3. Upgradation Duration:

The end-to-end migration from community edition to enterprise edition of Magento can take a significant amount of time depending upon the complexity of the current structure of the client. For analysis, implementation, testing till the final deployment, 6-8 weeks are normally required. Apart from that, if the client has a vastly customized complex design or if he has modified some of the core files, this further extends the timeline of the entire migration process. Thus, it is always advisable to plan your upgradation much before in advance. During peak seasons for your website, if you take up the project, it will result in additional stress and burden. So plan your migration at non-peak seasons when you are expecting less load so that the incoming traffic won’t be affected by any potential bugs and you can address any issue in due time without a degraded performance of your site.

4. Magento Solution Partner:

As you move to the enterprise edition of Magento, you might be putting in a significant amount of time and resources. Meanwhile, when you are more focused on your site’s technical improvisations, other key areas like marketing, promotions and strategizing take a backseat. So engaging a Magento solution partner is a wise choice in this case. However, choosing the right partner who will work as an extension of your in-house IT department is a key challenge.

An experienced Magento solution partner will be able to ensure the success of your migration project by providing important domain knowledge, scalable resources and better costs and timeline suggestions. So to ensure that you are moving in collaboration with the right partner, frame the right questions that you need to ask. Ask for case studies and customer testimonials to verify the authenticity of the prospective partner’s claims. Base your decision mostly on the expertise of the bidders and not on their bidding amounts.

Magento enterprise edition helps to create a novel digital experience for your website. It significantly reduces the effort and time that are required to build a successful website with Magento community edition. Magento development gets a completely new and simpler makeover with the enterprise edition. Besides all the challenges involved, the migration certainly gives your business an edge over your competitors.

Author Bio:

The author is Harshal Shah, CEO and founder of Elsner Technologies, a global IT consulting firm with expertise in magento development and delivering IT solutions on Web, Mobile and Cloud. He is a tech evangelist with a reputation to provide optimum solutions for business automation and solving real life problems with the power of IT.