CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
23 March 2010
Product News
Open Text Targets User Productivity With New Mobile Strategy
Open Text Corporation said it's extending the reach of its ECM solutions to mobile devices in a bold new strategy designed to help organizations harness the power of today's mobile workforce to increase productivity.
As part of its strategy, the company is unveiling a new application called Open Text Everywhere that will make the entire Open Text ECM Suite available via mobile devices. Focusing initially on BlackBerry® smartphones, the company announced a first set of mobile applications today with plans for more in the year ahead.
The time is right for mobile content applications, as smartphones gain in power and grow as a critical tool for productive workers on the go.
This increasingly mobile workforce will demand access to more enterprise content, business processes and collaborative tools normally reserved for the desktop or laptop. Today, the biggest applications dominating smartphones are email, calendaring, messaging, personal contacts, and entertainment.
"We call them 'smartphones' but the fact is they can take over the role of laptops," said Eugene Roman, Chief Technology Officer at Open Text. "The power of smartphones is only growing and they offer an entirely new platform to extend the productivity of workers in ways we never imagined just a few years ago."
For example, a September, 2009 study (*) by Forrester Consulting stated: "BlackBerry devices enable workers to be more efficient and productive in their daily work activities. These productivity benefits vary depending on the type of employee using the BlackBerry device, the range of mobile applications deployed over these devices, and the maturity deployment stage of the organization. For example sales professionals can improve weekly productivity by 1 to 2 hours per week in a reactive deployment organization, 4 to 7 hours per week in a proactive organization, and 13 to 21 hours per week in an integrative organization. Significant productivity benefit ranges are also achieved by field service and executive management personnel."
"Statistics like those are hard for senior management to ignore as they look to grow their business with shrinking budgets," said Roman. "Business doesn't stop when we leave the desktop or the laptop. It's time to unleash business content, processes and applications to go wherever employees need them on a smartphone. Open Text Everywhere will let CIOs extend the productivity power of mobility across their business."
Open Text Everywhere will deliver a comprehensive view of business processes, content and workplace social collaboration tools via native applications unique to each mobile platform. Open Text's first applications will be introduced for BlackBerry smartphones, but the company also plans to support other mobile operating systems in its product strategy. Open Text Everywhere uses the BlackBerry platform's secure connection transportation layer for fully encrypted wireless communication, and uses the same permission model to allow mobile users to access content in the Open Text ECM Suite.
The company's first Open Text Everywhere applications, featured in a video here http://www.opentext.com/everywhere, will be released to customers in early May. The applications include the ability to:
- Manage everywhere -- documents and content: The ability to browse
folders, and search, view, manage and email documents stored in the
Open Text ECM Suite. This application includes content viewers
capable of rendering special file formats, such as PowerPoint onto a
mobile screen.
- Engage everywhere through process workflows: The ability to initiate
business workflows, attach and view documents related to a business
process, approve or reject workflows; all through a user experience
designed natively for a mobile device.
- Collaboration everywhere using social media: Utilize Open Text's
collaboration and social tools, including participating in
communities, viewing and adding to social community wikis and blogs,
connecting with users and getting important information from member
profiles.
Open Text's plans to expand its mobile ECM applications include the following:
Late 2010:
- Mobile applications for Vendor Invoice Management and other
Transactional Content Management solutions, integrated with SAP. The
applications will allow users to manage content and processes for
SAP-based transactions while on the road.
- Mobile applications for its eDOCS document management solution
targeting mid-market enterprises, and mobile social media
applications based on Vignette Community Services and Vignette
Community Applications.
Early 2011:
- A mobile email management application that lets customers manage
email for legal, regulatory or corporate governance rules.
- A mobile website content management application that allows customers
to manage and post web content, respond to emergencies or manage
outages.
Longer term, Open Text plans to develop a mobile media management application that lets users import mashed up content images, video and text straight from a smartphone into secure, searchable repositories or online corporate social networks.
To learn more about Open Text Everywhere, go to: http://www.opentext.com/everywhere. BlackBerry users can also go to http://m.opentext.com
*Forrester Consulting, September 2009, Economic Impact Of A BlackBerry Solution In North American Enterprises
http://na.blackberry.com/eng/ataglance/get_the_facts/Economic_Impact_Of_BlackBerry_Devices_2.pdf
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