Use Your Existing Content with Enterspeed

Many of the organisations of today are digitally mature and have spent the last decade or more creating and curating a vast amount of digital content. The investment in content is likely much larger than the investment in technology – and good content always outlives IT. Let’s see if we can breathe some new life into this investment.

Over the years, we have helped many organisations migrate content from one platform to another. Many times, we have automated this process, but the majority of organisations chose to migrate manually.

The manual migration is often of higher quality, and the investment is roughly the same as the automatic migration when factoring in the post-migration editorial work.

Imagine if you could build a new website and wouldn’t have to worry about migrating content?

With Enterspeed, that is a possibility. In this blog post, we will outline in which circumstances this strategy could make sense and how it’s done.

When to re-use your existing content platform?

Below are some of the indicators that content re-use is a suitable strategy for your organisation:

• Your content has the needed structure
• Your CMS is tightly integrated into your business
• Your CMS accommodate your editors’ workflow and needs
• Your CMS platform is “out of warranty” (e.g. no security updates)
• Your website has performance issues

The concept of content structure might need some explaining. Approaching any task that involves content migration or re-use begins with an understanding of the structure, a concept computer science folks typically refers to as the data model.

We know it is kind of boring to talk about how the content is structured, but in order to make sense of it when using it outside its origin platform, the structure is important.

Generally, the rule is that the more structure your data has, the easier it is to reuse. But it does, of course, depend on your specific needs and circumstances. Don’t hesitate to contact Enterspeed for a quick evaluation of your content.

Luckily, we see a lot of well-structured content. This is often the case when an organisation has used their CMS for data enrichment or even as a de facto PIM system or there is a large investment in setting up workflows for the editorial process – approval, translations, etc.

With large investments in integrations, workflows, and editor training – and perhaps well-structured content – looking at a completely new web platform project represents not only expenses but also business risks.

But if your current platform is “out of warranty” from the platform vendor or your visitors don’t get the performance or user experience your business requires, then you, of course, need to act.

How to re-use your content?

We suggest that you begin the journey to decouple your content from your website. What we have experienced is that good content outlives both website design and content management systems.

This, taken together with the “headless” trends in web technology that are used to build web pages, makes a good case for putting in the effort to wrangling your content out of your existing content platform.

You now have to enter the world of APIs and integrations. APIs are what really makes the wheels turn in our hyper interconnected modern world. Every credit card transaction, every trade, every communication message happens via an API.

There is a good chance your current platform already has an API that exposes your content. If your platform doesn’t already have an API, one can be developed for a much smaller investment than rebuilding your entire setup.

You don’t have to worry about missing out on functionality. We have seen examples of this decoupled approach while keeping your editor’s workflow – complete with preview and scheduled publishing. Everything depends, of course, on built-in capabilities or custom development.

The investment is worth it, also for the future. Another upside is that if down the road you decide to change your content platform, you are not forced to change your website – or any other places where your content is used.

You just switch out the integration layer. We think the decoupled approach is the right way to prepare for the future, while still solving the present problems.

Building an integration is a highly technical concept and is out of scope for this blog post. At Enterspeed, we have many years of experience with integration tasks, various content platforms, and software development, so we are ready to help and engage with your development team – or put you in contact with our digital agency partner network.

How Enterspeed can help you improve performance?

Are you sitting with an old CMS that you actually like? There is no need to worry – there are ways to keep it running, hence maximising the value of your current content – but with a modern infrastructure and Enterspeed can help you continue with a secure and high performing solution with significantly lower investments than building a new CMS and migrating the content.

If you want to learn more, then please do not hesitate to contact us.