Dam migration
Moving to a new DAM system is one of the highest-risk moments in your digital asset program. Done well, it’s a clean transition. Assets land in the right place, metadata comes with them, integrations stay intact, and teams never notice the seams. Done poorly, it’s months of cleanup. Files go missing, links are broken, and assets are orphaned. Your team loses trust in the new system before they’ve given it a chance.
Ntara has run migrations for organizations with tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of assets. We’ve done it on aggressive timelines and under licensing deadlines. The approach is the same either way. Plan meticulously, migrate in phases, and validate everything.
Why this matters
Most organizations underestimate migration. The technical lift of moving files is manageable, but the hard part is the metadata. It can be tedious to reconcile old taxonomy to new schema, map legacy field values to new structures, and handle assets that were never properly tagged in the first place.
Migrations also carry compliance risk. Assets with expired rights shouldn’t be migrated. First, they need to be identified and quarantined. Assets with missing rights information should be assessed before they land in any system teams actively use.
Companies that get DAM migration wrong don’t just delay launch. They start the new system’s life with a credibility problem that’s difficult to overcome.
What it includes
Ntara’s DAM migration services cover the full scope of the move:
- Asset inventory and audit: what you have, what’s worth migrating, what isn’t
- Metadata mapping: aligning legacy schemas to new data models
- Rights and licensing review: flagging expired or uncleared assets before migration
- Migration execution: phased or full-lift, depending on timeline and risk tolerance
- Validation and QA: confirming assets, metadata, and relationships landed correctly
- Integration cutover: ensuring downstream systems (PIM, CMS, ecommerce) switch cleanly
- Post-migration: cleanup and optimization
Ntara’s approach to DAM migration
We begin every DAM migration with an audit. Before anything moves, we need to know what exists, how it’s structured, and what the new system’s data model requires. That gap analysis shapes the migration plan.
We migrate in phases where possible, starting with active, high-priority assets and working through the archive. This limits disruption, helping teams validate early and reduce risk.
We also handle the integration cutover, ensuring that when the old DAM goes dark, every downstream connection switches to the new system without a gap. That includes ecommerce syndication, PIM sync, CMS delivery, and more, depending on requirements.
What this looks like in practice
Bouclair had a licensing renewal deadline looming and a live ecommerce site dependent on DAM syndication. We helped run an accelerated migration, moving 85,000+ assets with updated metadata values, establishing the PIM integration and keeping the syndication to ecommerce intact throughout. This project landed on time, on budget, and at 50% of the cost of their previous platform.
Columbus McKinnon had been storing media directly in their PIM instance. As part of their PIM-DAM integration project, we created an outbound integration to automate the asset and metadata migration from PIM into DAM. This update moved all media in one coordinated pass, with metadata intact. Today, the integration continues to keep both systems in sync.
Kimberly-Clark’s migration was complicated by a metadata model mismatch. Their old system used a flat schema, while the new DAM implementation used a dynamic model in which fields adjust by asset type. We helped them map legacy metadata to the new model iteratively, identifying fields that required transformation rather than simple remapping. Then, we executed the migration without losing asset relationships or rights records.
This global shoe brand needed to move 500,000+ assets to a new DAM before a costly renewal of their outdated platform. Ntara led the migration as part of a broader implementation. We moved assets, restructured their metadata, rebuilt their permissions, and configured lifecycle management—all before the deadline.
Why Ntara for DAM migration
We’ve run migrations of every size, from tens of thousands of assets on tight timelines to hundreds of thousands requiring metadata model transformation. We know where migrations go wrong (rights gaps, metadata mismatches, integration cutover timing). In fact, we build the plan to avoid those failure points from the start.
We’re also experienced across the major DAM platforms, which means we understand both sides of a migration. We know what your old system gave you and what the new one requires.
Planning a DAM migration?
Start with an audit. We’ll assess your current asset library, flag migration risks, and scope the engagement before you commit.
