In episode 103 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Alan Pringle and Bill Swallow share some considerations for transitioning into a new component content management system or CCMS.
“You need to look at the requirements you have now. Are they being supported or not supported? Do you see this system helping you move forward with your content goals in three to five years?”
– Alan Pringle

Related links:

* Buyer’s guide to CCMS evaluation
* Life with a content management system (podcast)

Twitter handles:

* @alanpringle
* @billswallow

Transcript: 
Bill Swallow:                   Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we share some considerations for transitioning into a new component content management system or CCMS. Hi everyone. I’m Bill Swallow, and today I’m here with Alan Pringle.
Alan Pringle:                   Hello everyone.
BS:                   And we’re going to jump into a discussion about when we should be switching our component content management systems. So I think Alan, I’ll probably start off with a question to you. How do you know it’s time to move on with your existing CCMS?
AP:                   Well, everybody’s situation is going to be a little different, but in general, there’s some things that you can look out for as warning signs you may need to reconsider your CCMS. One of them being, sure things worked great when you stood the system up, but now a few years later, you’re finding that it is not scaling to meet your needs. You’ve got a whole lot more content in it. You have some feature sets that may not be there, that would be very helpful to you. So it’s a matter of, is that system keeping up with your growth and your changes? Is it keeping pace?
AP:                   In regard to the feature sets that I just talked about, if you discover that you’re spending a lot of time doing customizations to make things work for you, that may be a warning sign that you need to take a look at what some other systems offer as out of the box features because you do not want to be in this loop where you are spending a lot of time and money and investing in a system by basically doing patchwork add-ons to it. That’s not sustainable in the long run. If there is a system that has the feature that you’re looking for automatically, it may be worth considering that system, instead of doing this patchwork add-on to your existing setup.
AP:                   We’ve also seen cases where we had a client that was involved in a merger. And because of that, there were multiple component content management systems in the mix from the different, mostly technical publications departments that merged together from the different companies. So when you find yourself in a situation where you have acquired another company or you’re being acquired, you may have a situation where you’ve got overlap in your tool ecosystem, and in general, a company is not going to want to support two tools that do the same thing.
AP:                   So you have to take a look kind of from a bigger business point of view, at what the overarching goals and efficiencies that the company wants to make. And some of those efficiencies may be, we’re not going to have two CCMS’s here, we need to migrate everything to one. And I think it’s worth mentioning in that...