When do you upgrade?

Your installed ECM software runs well. How to you know when it needs to be upgraded? Should it be driven by tech or the business leaders? The answer is, sometimes both.

Technology Driven Upgrade

There are two major technical reasons that can result in needing to upgrade your ECM software.

Hardware/Software Upgrade:  Are you planning a hardware refresh? The application may run just fine on your old servers and workstations but, if it’s old enough, isn’t supported on the newer operating systems. Keep in mind that newer versions of the application may also have additional memory or CPU requirements.

Are you upgrading a third party application that interacts with your ECM application? Make sure that the two will still be compatible before you get started or you may be headed for a scramble.

Increasing Maintenance Costs:  Once the application reaches a certain age, the cost of maintenance both in terms of the administrative time investment of keeping it running and support contracts with your vendors starts to increase significantly. Upgrading can end up saving you time and money.

Business Driven Upgrade

New and Improved:  New and improved features are constantly being added to ECM applications as the industry matures. When your business needs call for functionality that only exists or works much better (advancements in OCR technology are a prime example) in a more current version of the application, it’s time to upgrade.

Service Level Agreements:  You may also have a business agreement that requires you to be no more than a certain number of versions behind. This is a common preventative approach to the technical drivers discussed above. On rare occasions, we also see organizations who want to be on the bleeding edge. While occasionally resulting in some heartburn, the extra time to work out kinks and become familiar with the latest and greatest tools can be a useful advantage.