Moving from Legacy to Modern CMS Platforms

There are many reasons to migrate to a modern CMS, some relate to the content you need to create, curate, and manage. Other reasons relate to the CMS technology and vendor directly.  

Let’s look at a few reasons you should consider migrating to a modern CMS from the perspective of the vendor or CMS technology. 

Vendor Support 

Are you getting the support you need from your CMS vendor? Some CMS vendors sell you their solution, then walk away. Others may help with the initial implementation, but anything you need after that, your IT team is on its own. And then there are others who charge for on-going support but getting access to help in a timely manner is challenging and your team is often frustrated with response times and a lack of resolution to their issues. 

Think about your CMS vendor. How would you rate them in terms of on-going support? How timely are they in responding to support requests? How quickly do they help you resolve your issues? Do they offer value-added services such as regular training to keep your team up to date on the latest updates to the CMS? 

You also need to consider the expected lifespan of your current CMS. Is the vendor sunsetting the version of the CMS you are using? When will that happen, and when will support end as well? 

CMS Complexity 

Your CMS is too complex for your needs. You paid for a solution that provides too many capabilities that you aren’t using or that don’t work the way you need them to. Maybe you thought you would need them, or the vendor recommended features your competitors used, that you should use too.  

Did you know that a lack of technical resources is the #1 challenge to supporting a CMS? 

From the 2019 Digital Priorities Report 

It happens far too often. You have a CMS that’s too big and complex for your needs and has become challenging to manage and support. It’s time to right-size your CMS investment, moving to something more appropriate for your current needs, with the ability to support future requirements when you are ready (and not before). 

Ingeniux offers Development as a Service.  Unlike some CMS vendors, you don’t have to design and develop your website on your own. Ingeniux offers the ability to leverage its professional services development to help you quickly get your site up and running. Our team can do all the work, work side by side with your internal team, work with a third-party design agency, or ensure you have the training you need to do the job on your own. Learn more.

Vendor Roadmap 

One of the biggest challenges with a legacy CMS is the lack of a defined vendor roadmap. Legacy CMS vendors don’t provide information on product direction because they spend most of their time supporting the current infrastructure and design. When there is a roadmap, it often focuses on how they are moving the current capabilities to a new underlying architecture.  

You know it’s time to migrate to a modern CMS if your vendor will spend the bulk of its future upgrades purely on the underlying architecture required to get it to a place where it can offer modern capabilities. 

CMS Costs 

Are you paying too much for your CMS? The costs related to purchasing a CMS and paying for on-going support are going down. You may find yourself in a situation where support costs and total cost of ownership are almost equal, or greater than the costs of a new modern CMS solution. If that’s the case, it’s time to migrate. 

SaaS 

SaaS is the future of CMS. If you are not using a SaaS CMS solution, you should consider it.  

1. A SaaS solution enables you to focus on content, and content experiences, not technology. The CMS vendor is responsible for the underlying technology. 
2. You can reallocate staff to support other important areas of the company, including developing web-based or mobile applications, or creating new front-end experiences. 
3. With a SaaS solution, you get 24/7 support, so you can always be sure your website is up and running. 
4. A SaaS solution provides better performance and security, including DDoS, intrusion detection, and more. It also provides regular upgrades, allowing you to test the upgrades against your website before you accept them.  

Ingeniux SaaS CMS: A SaaS platform with the flexibility to meet the custom requirements of your websites and applications, and the management services and standards to keep your sites operating 24x7 and delivering exceptional customer experiences.

We’ve shown you the things to look for to know when it’s time to migrate to a modern CMS and we’ve even hinted at how a modern solution can help. Now let’s take a look at some of the key capabilities you find in a modern agile content management platform. 

1. Modular content: Intelligent, structured content is the content model in a modern CMS. You define a taxonomy for all your content, including topics and metadata, that enables you to use that content across all your digital channels, not only your website.  
2. Decoupled for security, performance, and multi-site / channel: A modern CMS is decoupled, separating the administrative backend from the front-end delivery. The separation improves performance and provides a strong layer of security for your administration capabilities. It also enables you to create content once, storing it in the backend CMS repository, yet publish that content to multiple sites and channels.  
3. Native responsive templating and page building: Creating a website that works on desktop, tablet and mobile devices used to require a lot of development effort. A modern CMS provides native responsive templating and page building, enabling you to create web pages that works across all devices. A visual page builder enables non-developers to quickly create and publish new web pages to keep the website fresh and up to date. 
4. Headless API: Not all your digital channels will exist within the CMS, but you will still want to take advantage of its content management capabilties. A modern CMS provides the ability to create your website within the CMS environment (decoupled), and create custom front-ends – website, applications, mobile apps – that can manage and pull content from the CMS.  
5. Easy systems integration with CRM, Commerce, and other apps: Modern CMS solutions provide the architecture framework necessary to connect with other systems to share content and information needed to create a personalized, relevant web or portal experience.  
6. Easy to use: You may not have thought about this, but ease of use is a feature of a CMS. Modern CMS solutions are designed to make it easy to create content and content experiences. They support non-technical users who spend the most time in the CMS creating and managing content.
7. Cloud-ready and SaaS: Where would you rather spend your time and effort? Managing a content management technology and server environment? Or designing and managing a great digital experience? A modern CMS is cloud-ready and SaaS, taking care of all the architecture and CMS environment details for you, including security and compliance, backups and disaster recovery, testing environments, and more. 
8. Personalization and digital marketing: A modern CMS integrates with marketing technology such as marketing automation, personalization tools, testing and more to help create personalized digital experiences. It also offers the ability to personalize the experience using location, demographics, and IP address. 

A competitive digital experience requires you to be everywhere your customers are, providing relevant information. You need tools that help you do that easily. Traditional legacy CMS’ are riddled with hidden costs, and don’t offer the flexibility you need to streamline the content creation and distribution process. A modern CMS comes complete with the features and functionality needed to create content that is available to any channel or experience in the format that channel requires. Create and manage in one location, share with many.  

Traditional content management solutions are hosted on premise and rely heavily on IT to set up and manage, another challenge to setting up new experiences and adapting existing ones quickly. Time to market is a competitive differentiator today, and those companies that can get the right information to the customer in the right way, at the right time, are the ones who will win. 

"It's not the death of WCM," said Irina Guseva, lead analyst and lead author of the former WCM Magic Quadrant and senior research director focusing on WCM and DXP. "It’s the birth of WCM to a new definition of a content management system. Because now it's not only the web, obviously, that we need to tackle when you have Alexa, chatbots and different devices, modalities and channels. Content is not dying. It’s just turning into an original idea of a content management system that's intended for different content types and now for different channels.”