More than one third of companies surveyed by Jupiter Research last year that use content management systems say they expect to go live with a new CMS within the next year. For those planning to switch systems – or launch initially on a CMS – vendor-hosted content management systems available from a growing number of providers are a lower-cost alternative to packaged solutions, says Jupiter analyst Eric Peterson, but implementation may involve additional costs.
Those costs are in content migration, for while subscribing to a hosted CMS is one thing, getting existing content into a format that can be used by the new CMS is another. In researching Jupiter’s report, “Evaluating Costs and Benefits of Hosted Content Management,” Peterson says, “We found that that oftentimes, content migration is a hidden cost.”
Migrating existing content to the new CMS platform can be a tedious, manual process, if it’s in the form of web pages written over time by several different developers without the use of common standards. Or it can be relatively easy, when the content already is stored in a database or XML-compliant format, Peterson says. But in either case, Jupiter found, most CMS vendors view content migration as a separate cost beyond implementation support costs. Implementation support costs alone may represent 10% to 40% of the first-year subscription cost of a hosted CMS, Jupiter estimates.
Peterson notes that some CMS vendors are forthcoming about content migration, pointing out to clients that someone has to do the content migration, offering to do it for a fee or to recommend a third party, or making it clear to the client that content migration is the client’s responsibility. “But if you don’t know to ask the right questions, sometimes you might not get that information until it’s a too late,” he says. “It falls a little bit into the category of ‘buyer beware.’”
Yet a hosted CMS may be the most efficient and cost-effective approach for online retailers and others operating online, depending on the number of sites to be managed and the depth of the site operator’s IT organization, he says. “Hosted content management systems are highly appropriate for organizations with modest internal IT resources and a moderate number of web sites needing management,” Peterson concludes.
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