Tools you should use: RAZL V3

Bonus points if you remember this cartoon!

I recently upgraded to RAZL v3 and immediately started playing around with it to give it a good spin. One of my first tasks was migrating my content from Sitecore 7.1 to Sitecore 8.1. While going through this exercise, I definitely noticed good performance from RAZL V3. It seemed much faster than V2.5. I didn’t run any official benchmarks but it is noticeably faster.

Why upgrade?
Besides the overall performance gains from RAZL V3, there are several new features that Sitecore developers will want to leverage.
•    Lightning mode – a really fast way of comparing items. This mode only compares the revision ids for each item which is a real performance gain. Don’t worry once you drill into the item differences the field by field comparison is still used.
•    Hide Fields with no changes – Love this feature! With the new show/hide fields with no change button, the user can reduce the amount of information therefore making it much easier to find exactly what the user is looking for.

 •   Deep Compare – A new way to compare an item and its children without expanding the tree manually. It uses a similar look as history and gives a quick way to review a list of items in Sitecore. Note: Recommended that this is used in conjunction with Lightning mode.

 •    Export Task List – this feature sounds very promising although I haven’t played with it that much. It allows a user to export a list of task list operations to execute them at a later time. I imagine this could be used for migration scripts or to share scripts with other team members.

I remember the old days where tools such as RAZL were not available. What a nightmare it was trying to determine differences between Sitecore instances.  RAZL really is a must have tool for any Sitecore developer that has to deal with multiple instances. It helps keep things in sync and also provides the functionality for figuring out what’s missing from a particular Sitecore instance. For the price you can’t go wrong as it will pay for itself in no time when you consider the time it saves.