General

This document is primarily written for those who have not yet upgraded to OutSystems 11

OutSystems released version 11 last year. To stay within the loop of maintained versions, you should think about upgrading from your current version to a stable version of Platform 11. By the end of the year, OutSystems will probably release version 12, and then they probably will stop the maintenance of the Platform 10. Older versions are already deprecated.

With version 11 of the platform, OutSystems has changed some of the requirements. These changes include:

LifeTime needs to get its own dedicated environment (server and database). It is no longer possible to run LifeTime on one of the other application servers.

A special Platform Server installation is available for LifeTime. This installation supports version 10 (10.0.105.0 or later) and 11. It also has its own checklists.

The application server has to be at least Windows 2016. Windows 2019 is also supported in the latest platform versions.

The possibility to take over the pre-installation steps from the checklist has been added in the latest versions. These steps were automated with PowerShell scripts, but are available now as an option in the executable.

Instead of MS MQ, which was the default in older versions, RabbitMQ has been introduced as a queue mechanism in version 11.

The support of database management systems is limited to Microsoft SQL (versions 2014, 2016, 2017 and eventually in Azure or Amazon RDS) or Oracle (also on Amazon RDS). Support for MySQL is no longer available. This might have an impact on your environment, depending on where your OutSystems database is stored.

Upgrading to version 11 is only possible for the platforms with version 9.1 (9.1.616.0 or later versions ). Therefore, if you use an older version of the platform, first you have to upgrade to version 9.1.616.0 or later.

). Therefore, if you use an older version of the platform, first you have to upgrade to version 9.1.616.0 or later. Check the side effects and breaking changes document. Based on this document, you and the development team can estimate the required time to fix the breaking changes.

Planning the upgrade

Plan the upgrade in advance; consider that you can’t mix the development sprint with an upgrade sprint, because you might get uncontrolled side effects that are difficult to pinpoint and solve.

The development environment has changed. The new version of Service Studio (development environment) can only communicate with platform server 11. Luckily you can install version 10 and 11 next to each other on the same machine and work with both at the same time.

Schedule to upgrade the production environment at best possible timeframe. Plan to upgrade the other environments according to this initial planning (upgrading the production environment).

What’s new in OutSystems 11

You can simply replace data by drag and drop.

There is a new OutSystems UI framework with a lot of predesigned UI patterns and screen templates. This framework can be used as a replacement for the SilkUI framework. How to replace the SilkUI framework with the OutSystems UI is worth a new article.

It is possible to build Service Modules to support Micro Services.

Better handling of dependencies between modules.

You can deploy your applications to a container.

The publish process is improved; the deployment is faster since only the changes will be deployed.

It is possible to disable parts of the flows.

Upgrade step by step

You can start the upgrade when the application server with the correct version of Microsoft Windows is available. Make sure that the backups from the application server and database are available.