Migration from 7.6 to 17.1

Hi Gaurav, Please refer below thread where you may find answer to your query from the comment mentioned by Jonathan Katora:
forum.appian.com/.../e-261907

We are still working through some issues with our 7.11 to 17.1 upgrade and have it setup in a few test environments. So far our portal forms are working just fine in 17.1. We are slowly working on rewriting all of our portal forms & portal start forms as SAIL, but since we have a few large applications entirely written in Portal this will be a slow rewrite. I think our plan is to slowly migrate the forms in a few smaller applications in the next few months and rewrite the big ones in the next year or so. I think we have a year+ before Appian kills portal support in a future version and since we are usually behind a few versions anyway we have some time to migrate our applications.

FYI.. the referenced post, along with all historical posts from Tempo, has been migrated to Community..

Here is the new link..

community.appian.com/.../legacy-forms-designer

Please use this for any conversations..

Thanks Malcolm. I will get in touch in case i am stuck. Really appreciate.

Hi Gaurav,
We are also planing to migrate our system from 7.6 to 17.2 (Portal). As per the above discussion first we need to upgrade from 7.6 to 7.11 and then to latest version. Is it possible to migrate the portal application to latest version 17.2. Let me know if there any challenges .

Anecdotal thoughts: We were on 7.6 for quite a while, then 7.11 for quite a while. We just upgraded our on-premise install to 17.1 a few weeks ago. We too are still running a few large Portal based apps that utilize process reports, large grids in portal to show 'orders' that are in the system that have been created or completed in the last year, etc. (process backed). We have been writing our new apps in Tempo for quite a while and are slowly rewriting our Portal forms as SAIL.

We were delayed implementing 17.1 for a few reasons, but the big one was the change from LDAP based security to SAML. Both are via single-sign-on. As far as I know we could not upgrade past one of the 16.2 or 16.3 until we had the SAML infrastructure in place which took quite a while to build out for our enterprise. Once it was in place and stable our upgrade wasn't too bad, but I wasn't doing the actual server builds. There are a lot of configuration changes between 7.6, 7.11 and 17.x that will take a lot of testing on your side. Our Portal applications seem to be running just fine post upgrade, but we are heading Appian's push to migrate away from the Portal UI....just a slow process to rewrite.

I do not think there there is any 'easy' way to upgrade Portal apps. Two coworkers are rewriting some complex Portal forms that looped back via chaining to itself for form validation, etc. An intern rewrote another app's forms that are being tested now. The overall process flow for these Portal apps are not yet being rewritten fully, just tweaked to be more SAIL/Tempo based and more db centric (and less process based). That being said, there are significant benefits to reworking our UI as SAIL to make them dynamic with better validation and logic in the UI. Portal was great for a quick drag & drop way to build simple screens, but there were limits to what we could.

Side note, we have not yet seen a good way to identify every Portal form & portal based start form in our applications. We are hoping that Appian's health check or another tool will be able to do so in the future to help us identify our portal based forms that are still in use without us having to manually open every model, count instances that run, etc.