Planning the update

When preparing for the update, take into account the environments that you have in your pipeline. To ensure that the update process goes smoothly, use the following best practices:

1. Start the update process by cloning your staging environment. In this way, you will be able to run the update and test the application afterwards without interrupting other work that is happening in the staging environment.
2. Run the pre-update check on the cloned staging environment.
3. Update the cloned staging environment.
4. Note and resolve any potential issues that occurred during or after the staging update.
5. Update the production environment as soon as possible after the cloned staging environment, to ensure that there are few differences between the staging and production data.
6. After the production update is completed successfully, run the pre-update check on any other environment that you have in your pipeline, for example, staging, development, QA, or BOE, and update each of them.
7. Optional: Update your Next-Best-Action Designer in a staging environment and review the performance of your strategies to ensure that they continue to give the expected results. For more information, see Updating Next-Best-Action Designer.

Update paths

This update process is intended for updates from the following application versions to Pega Customer Decision Hub 8.7:

• Pega Customer Decision Hub 8.1 or newer
• Pega Customer Decision Hub for Communications 8.5
• Pega Customer Decision Hub 8.5
• Pega Marketing 8.1 or newer
• Pega Marketing for Communications 8.1-8.4
• Pega Marketing for Financial Services 8.1-8.4

For an overview of the update paths available when updating from older versions of Pega Customer Decision Hub, see Update Guides.

Communications and financial services applications merged with Pega Customer Decision Hub

The following industry-specific applications are not available as standalone applications starting in version 8.6:

• Pega Customer Decision Hub for Communications 8.5
• Pega Customer Decision Hub 8.5
• Pega Marketing for Communications 8.4 and earlier
• Pega Marketing for Financial Services 8.4 and earlier

The capabilities of these applications are merged with Pega Customer Decision Hub. Communications service providers and financial organizations that use the previous versions of these applications can update them to Pega Customer Decision Hub 8.7 by following the instructions in this update guide.

Additional information

If you are updating from versions 7.13-7.4, see Update Guide from 7.x.