Johannesburg, 23 Aug 2010
Open Text Corporation, the pre-eminent provider of enterprise content management (ECM) software, today announced Open Text Semantic Navigation, an innovative tool that helps audiences naturally navigate through volumes of information based on the inherent meaning of the content and increasing Web marketing and online search effectiveness.
Available as a cloud offering or on-premise, Semantic Navigation gives organisations an easy way to improve engagement with online audiences.
Companies of all sizes invest heavily to develop content they hope will boost brand awareness, sell goods and services, and increase customer loyalty. This content, however, can be spread across multiple servers and repositories where it is difficult for readers and search engines to find. Simple keyword searches assume the audience is willing to manually scroll through pages of results and hunt down countless blind alleys to find relevant content. Before long, the audience becomes frustrated and goes elsewhere.
Forrester Research made a similar observation in a January 2010 report, titled: The Best and Worst of Site Search 2010: "People who visit your corporate Web site need to be able to find the information they seek. Depending on what they need and what they already know, your visitors may choose to browse or search. Great online user experiences are useful (deliver value), usable (provide easy access to value), and desirable. The search experience can either enhance or detract from the overall user experience."
Open Text Semantic Navigation offers a way to improve the user experience. At the core of the offering is the Open Text Content Analytics engine that intelligently extracts meaning, sentiment and context from content, and in turn marries that content to what a customer or prospect is looking for on a Web site. The result is that audiences more consistently and quickly find helpful, valuable information with much less effort.
"The volume and diversity of content continues to grow much faster than organisations can efficiently manage, meaning that the true potential of that content to boost audience engagement is never realised," commented James Latham, Chief Marketing Officer, Open Text. Latham expands on these issues in an Open Text podcast with Forrester Senior Analyst Leslie Owens, available here. "We believe semantic and content analysis technology holds significant promise for helping organisations change this equation. Open Text Semantic Navigation is a great example of the ways we are bringing this technology to market to help solve a number of difficult problems around content discovery and presentation."
Among the Web sites turning to Semantic Navigation is The Globe and Mail, Canada's National Newspaper. "We have a lot of conversations about Web-based opportunities at The Globe and Mail," added Kevin Schlueter, Enterprise Architect. "The common theme in many of these requests is the need for a sophisticated search and navigation solution. So, we looked carefully at what was available and chose Open Text's Semantic Navigation product. We now have a critical building block for the next generation of features we plan to build for."
Rapid results with online trial
A complete solution, Open Text Semantic Navigation is designed to complement any existing Web site, independent of the Web content management system used, either installed on local servers or as an online service provided by Open Text. With the cloud-based offering (currently in beta), organisations can rapidly and inexpensively upgrade their sites' user experience using a free, fully functional 30-day trial.
Once the trial is activated, Semantic Navigation first collects content through a crawling process. Then the content is automatically analysed and tagged with relevant and insightful entities, topics, summaries and sentiments; the key to providing an engaging online experience. Next, content is served to users through intuitive navigation widgets that encourage audiences to discover the depth of available information or share it on social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. From there, Semantic Navigation supports placement of product and service offerings or advertising to convert page views into sales.
Beyond improving the audience experience, Semantic Navigation can also bring more people to an organisation's Web site. It does this through delivery of authoritative and search engine optimisation-rich Web pages that are easy for search engines to discover. It also can help decrease Web marketing operating costs with its front-end flexibility and rapid deployment using industry-standard taxonomies.
For further information, please contact Rob Shaw: tel +27 83 626-3811, fax +27 86 646 4178, e-mail rshaw@opentext.com.
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