CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

23 June 2009

Product News

Open Text Adds Comprehensive Social Media Capabilities to the Open Text ECM Suite, Delivers on Enterprise 2.0

Open Text™ announced another major part of its Enterprise 2.0 strategy with a new software offering, Open Text Social Media, the latest addition to the Open Text ECM Suite. The solution offers a natural and intuitive social media application that gives people new ways of working productively together through the Web and mobile devices, while also meeting security and compliance demands by being integrated with a company's wider ECM system.

Traditional tools such as email are ill-suited for the task of connecting people in social networks, leading many employees to embrace consumer-oriented social media technologies, with or without corporate approval. While these tools can boost productivity, their use leads to concerns around security, intellectual property protection, knowledge preservation and compliance. Open Text Social Media, for the first time, gives organizations a way to address these concerns by marrying social media technology to an enterprise-ready content management infrastructure. The new solution adds to Open Text's collaboration products offered in the Open Text ECM Suite, providing a combination of document centric collaboration solutions and a new solution that connects people to people to content in social networks designed for the enterprise.

Open Text Social Media also meets the demands of today's increasingly mobile knowledge workers who demand mobile solutions that enable them to access key corporate systems. For social media solutions to be truly successful they need to provide a rich mobile experience. Open Text Social Media provides this with native mobile applications for Apple iPhone and RIM BlackBerry devices initially, with additional device support planned.

"A virtual and mobile workforce and the explosion of user-generated content have created a demand for a new model for enterprise collaboration. Open Text Social Media builds on social media applications to deliver a secure online environment where employees, customers, and partners can meet, share, network, and experience the power of collective knowledge," said John Myers, General Manager, Social Media at Open Text. "This new component of the Open Text ECM Suite enables organizations to benefit from these new ways of working together within the overall context of the organization's records and content management strategy."

"Like most federal government departments, we are very email centric and keeping people up to speed involves sending project updates and supporting documents to already overloaded inboxes," said Art Monette of Canada's Federal Judicial Affairs, one of the organizations beta testing the solution. "Open Text Social Media offers us central project sites with user profiles, discussion feeds, documents and wikis - everything in one place to keep everyone up to date. This alone is a huge timesaver. The ability to set up user profiles with photos and background information makes a big difference in helping people from cross-functional teams in different locations to work better together."

Enterprise Readiness

Organizations are facing ever-increasing regulatory and legal requirements that are driving demand for records management, archiving, and discovery solutions for electronic content such as email and documents. Open Text is a world leader in this area, and by integrating its new social media offering with the content services of the Open Text ECM Suite, organizations can now effectively manage communications such as discussions, blogs, and wikis with the same set of security, compliance, and archiving policies that they use to manage email and other content today. Advanced security mechanisms make it easy to manage who has access to information and even enable content to be safely shared beyond the firewall to include customers, partners and suppliers.

Consistently Easy to Use

When it comes to rolling out social media applications internally, organizations have turned to one-off or point solutions. Over time, this leads to a costly and confusing proliferation of applications and user interfaces. Open Text Social Media, by contrast, gives customers a consistent and integrated user interface. This means, for example, that useful information such as online status, user pictures and profiles are always available regardless of context (in a wiki, in a discussion, documents area etc.) This consistency lowers deployment and maintenance costs, improves user adoption and reduces training requirements. Key features of Open Text Social Media include:

    -   Personal Dashboard - Gives users a quick overview of communities, "My

        People," My Watches" and other pending and status details.

    -   Communities - Provides a virtual space where a group of people can

        work together electronically by sharing ideas, opinions, and

        information through discussions, document sharing, and wikis.

    -   Profiles - Lets users create/edit their profiles, add a photo, update

        their status, and view other people's profiles. Mini-profiles are

        generated automatically, allowing zero-click contextual display of a

        user's name, photo, contact information and presence status.

    -   Blogs and Microblogs - Users can publish a personal blog with their

        profiles. Users can create, edit and delete their own blog postings,

        and view and comment on other people's blogs.

    -   Wikis - The Wiki tab within a community provides a simple WYSIWYG

        wiki system. Page linking is supported and an automatic navigation

        pane expands as new pages are created. Users can edit, comment, view

        past versions, email out, tag and watch wiki pages.

    -   Social Search - Fast search delivers relevant content, people, and

        communities in parallel and displays relevancy-ranked results, while

        fully respecting permissions. Real-time indexing ensures immediate

        search results and handles all community data as well as many common

        file types.

    -   Mobility - Users can access community information from smart handheld

        devices such as BlackBerry and iPhone.

Availability and Further Information

Open Text Social Media will be generally available in July, 2009. To learn more, go to: http://cli.gs/OTSocialMedia.

About The Enterprise 2.0 Conference

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference explores the integration of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise, from both strategic and tactical perspectives. For more information visit: www.e2conf.com. Open Text is a Gold sponsor of the conference and will be showcasing its solutions at Booth No.615.

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