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Before you touch Content Management 26.2, treat it like a production change.

Not a feature upgrade. 26.2 changes how the platform authenticates to Microsoft, retires a component many estates still depend on, and adds an agent that can act on records. Each is manageable. None is routine.

Book a 45-minute continuity check call Run the 15 checks firstFree, and honest: if your estate is ready, we say so.

Four things that bite

What goes wrong in practice, and what to confirm before you promote.

Every one of these has cost an estate a failed cutover. All four are checkable in advance.

Entra ID app-only authentication

From 26.2 the old SharePoint App Credentials are no longer supported for the affected Microsoft integrations, including Teams, Outlook and archiving. Microsoft retired the underlying authentication service on 2 April 2026, so this is not optional. Confirm every integration has an Entra ID application registration with certificate-based app-only access before the upgrade, not during it.

Office Online Server retirement

Microsoft retires Office Online Server on 31 December 2026. OpenText has said it will provide only limited cover for the on-premises Office Online Broker after that date and will not release new versions of the broker from 26.2. If your users edit documents in the browser on an on-premises estate, you need a plan for that before the end of the year, and the upgrade is the moment to make it.

Custom modules and System Center Update Analysis

Run the update analysis before you promote anything. It lists every file the update will change and marks each as new, verified or different. Every custom and optional module needs the same treatment: confirm it is supported on 26.2, and test it on a copy that genuinely matches production.

A real rollback path

System Center can roll back the application files it changed. It cannot roll back the database, the file store or the search index. A rollback you can actually use means a full backup of all three, taken together, restored once to prove it. That is check 5 on our list, and the one most estates have never tested.

New in 26.2

Content Aviator can now act, not only answer.

In 26.2, Content Aviator gains its first agentic capabilities. It can move, copy, rename and delete objects, and it can classify documents, place legal holds and apply markings on the records side. That is genuinely useful.

It is also more governance load on whoever runs the platform. An agent that can touch records-management holds needs the same care as a person who can: permissions reviewed, actions logged, and someone accountable for what it did last Tuesday. Decide who that is before you switch it on.

One person deep

If the estate is one person deep on operations, check before the window, not after the first failed cutover.

Most 26.2 problems are found by an administrator who knows the estate well, on a test copy, weeks ahead. Where that person is stretched, on leave or recently gone, the same problems get found in production on the night.

The fifteen checks are written to be run without us, in about half a day, and they surface exactly the gaps an upgrade exposes: the untested restore, the undocumented customisation, the configuration nobody owns.

OpenText estate health: 15 checks worth running

Before the cutover

Start with 45 minutes, free.

A continuity check call: you describe the estate and the upgrade plan, we tell you which of the four above will bite and whether anything else needs a closer look. If your estate is ready, we say so. Where it is not, the Estate Continuity Review does the full pass, at a fixed price credited in full against the work that follows.

Book the check call How we keep estates stable

Senior-led. Named engineer, not a ticket queue. On-premise and private cloud.

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