Planned Adobe Shutdown of Business Catalyst Impacts Small Firms – Small Business Trends

Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE) has announced it is discontinuing Business Catalyst, with deletion scheduled for March 26, 2020. The end of life of this popular Content Management System (CMS) has surprised the thousands of businesses that use the platform.

Business Catalyst is an all-in-one CMS designed to help businesses and digital agencies manage their websites and ecommerce. It integrates sales, services and marketing features.

Michelle Dale of Virtual Miss Friday represents many of the small business owners who will be affected by this decision from Adobe. In a video, she says her partnership with Adobe Business Catalyst started 10 years ago and it is the CMS platform she has relied on.

For Dale and other businesses like hers, it means finding another CMS before the 2020 deadline Adobe has announced. And although two years might seem a long time, there are businesses with many websites and massive amounts of data they have to export to a new platform. Not to mention businesses who have allocated thousands of dollars to become a Lifetime Partner and the learning curve of a new system.

It is extremely important to note Adobe said it will take down all Business Catalyst servers on March 26, 2020. And when this happens, the data of all its customers will be deleted. This is why you should find a new solution as soon as possible. Granted it is easier said than done, but the process has to begin.

This is especially important when it comes to support, because Adobe said it will only continue to repair critical issues such as security, payments or customer data, but it will not be fixing minor items with small impact and available workarounds. The company goes on to say this work will be limited to bugs with high security or high stability risk. So the sooner you find a viable alternative and migrate your data, the better it will be for you, your customers and security.

If you use Business Catalyst, here are some important dates to keep track of.

In other related news, Adobe has also announced the end of life for Muse, a website builder software. Organizations using Business Catalyst have also incorporated Muse into their workflow to manage and simplify the creation of websites. The shutdown process has already started with the final feature release of Muse on March 26, 2018. However, technical support for Creative Cloud customers will continue through May 20, 2019.

The Adobe Forum , Business Catalyst , and Muse sites have additional information.

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