…and the new owner takes over at the end of the month. We heard that recently from two of our clients - one a multinational in the drug sector for whom we provide services through their fulfillment company and the other a small privately held accessory manufacturing firm in the food sector with whom it had been our pleasure to work with for years.
In both cases, the sites in question were based on customized CMS and/or e-Commerce platforms we had rolled out and in both cases, the clients and their marketing teams were able to handle most of the necessary changes using admin tools.
But there are always a few nooks and crannies – switching API login credentials and/or Gateway APIs’ for payment handling, advising on MX and DNS changes, providing extended find and replace services in the database for bulk updates to identity related content, assuring that notification processes such as error logging and success/failure messaging are properly re-routed, transferring licensing, etc – that Client marketing resources may not be aware of and/or don’t have time for and for which they will rely on you.
Which is why we keep a log of 3rd party touchpoints, external calls and access lists – and we assume you do, too ;-)
Also, where practical, we try to avoid doing anything directly in the code that is tied to site ownership. That isn’t always possible. For one of these clients, a single-sign on function that made multiple calls to an external ERP needed to be modified – but that was a Change Order for the new owner rather than a chore for the previous.