Lava Systems Africa, an affinity partner of Canadian-based Open Text, and one of the companies within the Enterprise Content & Wireless (ECW) Group, today announced an office business application (OBA) for assessing and managing customer information.
One of the first OBAs built on the 2007 Microsoft Office system to be commercially available, Open Text's Livelink ECM - customer information management (CIM) gives users of Microsoft Office applications a complete view of all the information associated with customers, whether that information lives in SAP application-based systems, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, or other content repositories.
Open Text's solution is being used by ThyssenKrupp Nirosta, one of the world's leading manufacturers of stainless steel, to streamline e-mail-based order processing and handling of general customer inquiries.
Livelink ECM - Customer Information Management extends the functionality of Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 by listing all documents, including shipping details, contracts, or purchase orders for raw materials found after checking keywords in incoming e-mails.
The documents and data may come from several different sources, including SAP applications and production planning systems, and when displayed in Office Outlook, enables users to more promptly and efficiently respond to customers.
"Open Text products and solutions help us manage all business-critical documents in the context of our customer-related processes," commented Klemens Bransm"oller, CIO of ThyssenKrupp Nirosta.
"Livelink ECM - Customer Information Management extends the integration of SAP solution-managed processes into the Microsoft Office environment, by adding document-centric information. The combination of technologies from SAP, Microsoft and Open Text in use at ThyssenKrupp provides our employees with simplified, automated, event-driven (internal and external) access to all process-centric (structured) and document-centric (unstructured) customer information through the standardised and familiar Microsoft Office interface. We expect this optimised interaction between solutions from SAP, Microsoft and Open Text will further reduce our customer-centric transaction and process costs."
Livelink ECM - Customer Information Management delivers on the promise of OBAs to empower end-users, increase productivity and remove a significant training and support burden from IT. In addition, Open Text offers a number of extensions and connectors to enable Open Text partners and customers to build enterprise-scale OBAs, incorporating the same technology platform as Open Text's customer information management solution, including connectors to Open Text Livelink ECM and SAP applications.
Open Text is uniquely qualified to bring OBA solutions to market. OBAs mask a significant amount of complexity behind a simple yet powerful interface. Open Text's OBA solutions build on the company's content management expertise, close working relationship with Microsoft, and deep knowledge of and proven track-record of integrating with SAP applications. Open Text is a leader in providing ECM solutions that extend the Microsoft platform, and last year was named the 2006 Microsoft Global ISV Partner of the Year. Open Text also works closely with SAP as a SAP Software Partner.
In May, the companies announced that SAP would resell archiving and document access solutions from Open Text, building on a two-decades-long partnership and experience from more than 2 500 customer sites around the world.
"OBAs such as Open Text's LiveLink ECM bring tremendous value to enterprise customers," added Eddie Amos, General Manager of the Developer and Platform Evangelism Group at Microsoft Corporation. "Applications such as this give users the ability to get the data and content they need out of back-end, line-of-business systems using familiar Microsoft Office applications, and to have that data presented in a meaningful business context."
"We see Microsoft Office Business Applications emerging as one of the most widely adopted platforms in the industry for addressing business problems where users need easy access to back-end data, in context to the processes typically managed within the familiar office environment," concluded Doug Jones, Vice-President, Global Strategic Alliances at Open Text. "Through our collaboration with Microsoft, Open Text is able to take a leading role in creating complete OBA solutions while also offering additional technologies that extend the types of OBAs our customers and partners can create."
For further information, please contact Ray Dalgarno, Lava Systems Africa: tel 011 675-7193, fax 011 675-4075, e-mail rayd@lavasystems.co.za.
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