Migrating from OpenText Web CMS (Teamsite): Why Enterprises Are Moving to CrafterCMS

OpenText has been a long-time vendor in the web content management space, offering TeamSite as its flagship CMS product. However, as digital experiences become more dynamic, interactive, and content-rich, enterprises using OpenText Web CMS (TeamSite) are increasingly finding it unable to meet their evolving needs.

As a result, we are seeing organizations moving away from it, and migrating to CrafterCMS, which offers a compelling alternative. In this blog, we'll explain why migrating to CrafterCMS is the right choice for major enterprises looking to innovate faster, save costs, and improve their productivity building and managing modern digital experiences.

Challenges with OpenText Web CMS (TeamSite) 

OpenText TeamSite has served enterprises well over the years but is now showing limitations:

• Outdated Architecture: TeamSite’s monolithic architecture hinders agility, scalability, and the seamless integration required by today's businesses.

• Complex Upgrades and Maintenance: Enterprises struggle with time-consuming upgrades, maintenance overhead, and costly licensing.

• Limited Headless Capabilities: While TeamSite has added APIs, it lacks the robust, native headless architecture needed for multichannel digital experiences.

Why Migrate to CrafterCMS?

CrafterCMS is an enterprise-grade headless CMS that empowers companies to deliver exceptional content-centric digital experiences, including large-scale websites, mobile apps, customer portals, intranets, e-commerce stores, and more. Here’s why CrafterCMS is the ideal solution for enterprises migrating from OpenText:

Modern, Decoupled Headless Architecture

CrafterCMS’s fully decoupled architecture separates content authoring (Crafter Studio) from content delivery (Crafter Engine). CrafterCMS’s API-first approach ensures enhanced agility, scalability, security, and performance, supporting robust multichannel experiences.

Java-Based, Developer-Friendly Platform

Built with Java and Spring, CrafterCMS offers platform independence, seamless integration capabilities, and enhanced security. Developers accustomed to TeamSite’s Java-based ecosystem will find it easy to transition and extend CrafterCMS with familiar tools and frameworks.

Superior Content Authoring Experience

Crafter Studio provides an intuitive, powerful content authoring experience, featuring WYSIWYG editing, drag-and-drop experience building, and real-time, in-context previews across multiple channels. These features significantly surpass TeamSite's traditional forms-based authoring and complex workflows, enhancing productivity and satisfaction for content teams.

AI-Powered CMS 

With built-in AI support for both content authors and developers through native LLM integrations, a built-in AI orchestration framework and AI vector database and semantic search engine, CrafterCMS enables rapid development of innovative digital experiences and drives outstanding productivity results.

Git-Based Content Repository

CrafterCMS uniquely leverages Git for content storage and versioning. This enables robust workflows, multi-file versioning, branching, and collaboration, surpassing the database-centric limitations found in TeamSite. Content teams benefit from Git’s advanced tracking and version control without needing deep technical knowledge.

DevContentOps for Accelerated Innovation

CrafterCMS pioneers the DevContentOps methodology that is enabled by its Git-based repository (to store content, code and configuration within a single distributed repository for each CMS site and app), synchronizing content workflows with development pipelines. Teams can effortlessly publish updates, implement new features, and deliver digital innovations quickly. Compared to database-centric CMSs such as TeamSite, CrafterCMS significantly accelerates time-to-market.

Open Source Advantage

CrafterCMS is open source under the GPL license, eliminating vendor lock-in, reducing total cost of ownership, and providing access to a thriving community and ecosystem of plugins and extensions. Unlike TeamSite’s proprietary model, CrafterCMS ensures enterprises remain agile and adaptable to future market demands.

Composability and Extensibility

CrafterCMS is highly composable, allowing seamless integration of new functionalities via its powerful plugin framework and marketplace. Enterprises can quickly enhance websites and apps by adding capabilities like AI-powered chatbots, analytics, personalized content, and more.

Flexible Deployment Models

Enterprises gain deployment flexibility with CrafterCMS, choosing between on-premises, private cloud, or public cloud solutions (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud). Crafter Cloud, a private SaaS built on AWS, offers fully managed, secure, scalable infrastructure..

How to Migrate from OpenText Web CMS (TeamSite) to CrafterCMS 

CrafterCMS simplifies migration from TeamSite with its open architecture, XML/JSON content formats, and Git-based repository. Migration typically involves three straightforward steps:

1. Define Your Migration Strategy: Outline targets, timelines, responsibilities, and necessary resources.

2. Migrate Content into XML and Git: Ensure all content is exported correctly, refactored, and reformatted into standards-based XML files. Importing into CrafterCMS’s Git-based repository is is then super simple.
   

3.  Execute Migration: Seamlessly transition your existing digital assets, websites, apps, and integrations onto CrafterCMS. Moving your sites and apps onto CrafterCMS’s robust set of REST and GraphQL APIs is straightforward, and is streamlined even further with support for you to build custom APIs (using server-side Groovy scripting) that mimic Teamsite's APIs.

Explore our dedicated Migration Services to ease your journey from OpenText TeamSite to CrafterCMS.