If you’re reading this, you already know. The requests keep piling up. The workarounds are the workflows. The annual cost is too high. The team stopped expecting the system to work the way it should.
The question isn’t whether to switch. It’s how to do it without losing momentum and without landing in the same place with a new DAM.
Here’s the playbook.
Step 1: Get Aligned Before You Move
The decision might feel obvious to you. It’s probably not obvious to everyone else yet.
Before anything moves, get alignment on two things:
1. Where are we going
2. How do we know when we’ve arrived
Build the internal case by answering three questions with your stakeholders:
- What does this tool actually cost beyond the license — in time, training, and friction?
- What specific problems should the new system solve?
- What does success look like 90 days after switching, in real measurable terms?
That last one matters most. Make it specific. “Fewer Slack requests” isn’t a goal. “Request volume under 3 per week” is.
A solid case shouldn’t take more than a couple hours to build. The hardest part of switching isn’t the migration. It’s alignment throughout and adoption.
Step 2: Evaluate Tools Against Outcomes, Not Features
Teams spend weeks scoring features on a spreadsheet, pick the highest-scoring tool, and then wonder why nothing changed. A 47-checkbox spreadsheet tells you what a tool can do. It tells you nothing about whether your team will actually use it.
Start with outcomes in mind. Write down three metrics that would prove the switch worked — something like external portal usage up 3x in 90 days, or asset requests to marketing under five per week.
Every DAM demo has a job: can this tool move these numbers?
Before you sit in a demo, talk to your top two or three power users about the real workflow. What breaks? What have they quietly stopped trying to do? What’s held together by excessive manual effort? That’s the workflow you need to test for and improve upon, not the vendor’s scripted version.
For a DAM, three things are non-negotiable: simplicity, external distribution, and search that actually works.
Everything else is surface area to maintain. The goal isn’t the most capable tool. It’s the one your team will use.
Step 3: Don’t Migrate Your Old Problems — Use AI to Level Up
The migration itself can do more than most teams expect.
I recently finished a migration where the customer’s library wasn’t even in bad shape, but by the time we were done, we had touched 99% of their files between their old platform and landing in Collage:
- 98.4% of files had tags normalized
- Improved searchability
- 70.4% of files had filenames standardized
- Better user experience
- 70.2% of files had storage locations remapped to the new org structure
- A more browsable content library
- 42.8% of files had custom fields enriched or added
- Richer data for your AI workflows
That’s leveling-up branded assets so they’re more useful to your team and in AI systems. The content ops that’s always in the background — inconsistent naming, bloated taxonomies, metadata that accumulated over years — is handled in the migration window, not after.
Most teams inherit that debt and carry it forward. It slows search, creates confusion, and quietly costs time every single week.
Migration is a blank slate. You don’t have to migrate your old problems. (We wrote more about how this audit works in Nobody Audits Their DAM. We Do It Before Every Migration.)
Step 4: Make the Switch a Public-Facing Win
I’ve seen too many migrations fail because of lone wolves. One team member who wants to — or has to — handle the entire migration themselves. They build the structure, move the assets, configure the settings, announce it’s live.
And then nobody shows up. Nobody buys in.
Even on a lean team, migration is not a solo project.
A few things that can help drive a successful switch:
- Consider starting with a single use-case. What process or workflow will benefit most? Where can your team get the most value from the new platform? Is there an asset type or process that presents relatively little risk for the potential value?
- Schedule 2–3 group check-ins with your team and vendor during the transition. Having direct vendor support when you hit issues is invaluable.
- Don’t skip microtraining. Send a short, skimable email or Slack message before launch. What changed, where to find things, two minutes to read. Make the recording easy to find. External users need a version of this too — agencies and partners won’t dig through a new portal on their own.
- Time the launch deliberately. Don’t go live during your busiest week hoping people figure it out. Don’t launch right before a holiday. Maximize attention on the win.
The switch takes a few days of focused work. Building momentum takes intention.
Step 5: Drive Adoption Like You Mean It
Switching takes a few days, but building adoption takes 90.
We assume colleagues will care and figure out the new system. They often don’t, because they’re busy. Here’s how to combat the old habits.
Make early wins visible — not just to leadership, but to the whole team. “Marketing used to field 30 asset requests a week. Now it’s five.” That’s a ten-second Slack update. Track external portal usage too: “Partners downloaded 200 assets from the Brand Portal this month.” These wins keep the tool top of mind more than any training doc ever will.
Get the new system into your company onboarding so new hires start with good habits instead of inheriting workarounds. Set up automated usage reviews — use n8n or Claude to pull monthly reports on login frequency, request volume, and portal usage. It’s the kind of visibility that keeps adoption from quietly slipping.
The 90-day adoption milestones to aim for:
- Week 1 — Migration complete. Send a clear announcement with instructions for all user types: admins, power users, and external partners.
- Week 2 — Host office hours or a live Q&A. Record it for people who can’t attend.
- Week 4 — Share your first usage win. Concrete evidence the system is working.
- Week 8 — Get the DAM integrated into company onboarding. New hires start right.
- Day 90 — Pull your metrics. Login frequency, request volume, external portal usage. Compare to week one. Share the progress.
Look out for red flags. If internal users are still Slacking for assets at day 30, either search isn’t working or people are stuck in their ways — ask around, find out what’s happening. If request volume is flat at day 60, you need to re-engage your champions. If your external portal has had zero sessions after a month, your partners haven’t been properly onboarded. These aren’t failures, but they’re signals.
Adoption doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when you simplify the ask, build relationships with critical users, and make the wins impossible to ignore.
You’ve Already Done the Hardest Part
You’ve already done the hardest part by recognizing the tool you’re on isn’t the tool you need.
The teams that execute this change well don’t just get a better DAM. They get their workflows back, their time back, and their team’s trust in the system back.
Collage’s migration assistance helps improve search quality, cuts asset request volume dramatically, unlocks external distribution, and gives teams back hours they didn’t know they were losing.
If you’re ready to level-up your DAM, let’s talk.
