Open Text unveils ECM Suite 2010, marking new era of integration

Open Text Corporation, the preeminent provider of enterprise content management (ECM) software, today announced the release of Open Text ECM Suite 2010, the largest innovation effort in the company's history to create the industry's most comprehensive, fully integrated ECM solution suite.

The unique value of ECM Suite 2010 is its combination of technologies covering all aspects of ECM. Open Text adds wide-ranging new functionality linked through numerous integration points covering 90 products and modules, and spanning everything from compliance, business process management and portals to integrated mobile support and enterprise information archiving.

The result gives customers the most complete content management system available to handle the vast array of content types, languages, applications, user needs and business processes in their organisations.

ECM Suite 2010 gives organisations the power to move ECM beyond projects or functional deployments, where ECM crosses systems and departments to add greater value, helping to reduce costs and increase productivity. The strength of the ECM Suite is its core services layer - process services, user interface services and the cornerstone of the ECM Suite, the Enterprise Library (formerly Livelink), with integrated archiving, metadata management, search and records management. All ECM Suite components integrate with this layer. ECM Suite 2010 adds leading capabilities from acquired technologies to further strengthen the ECM Suite:

* Open Text Portal (from Vignette): Offers a powerful, standards-oriented portal capability that publishes content from the ECM Suite, from processes, from the Web, Open Text Social Communities, and other content sources.
* Open Text Web Experience Management (from Vignette): Offers a dynamic Web content management capability for the ECM Suite. It can publish content from the Enterprise Library, Open Text Social Communities and Open Text Media Management. It can also publish into the Portal. Web content can be archived and managed with the ECM Suite.
* Open Text Social Communities (from Vignette): Adds dynamic social and community intranet and extranets capabilities to the ECM Suite. Content can also be archived and put under records management.
* Open Text Content Analytics, Semantic Navigation (from Nstein): Adds content analytics technology into the ECM Suite, allowing users to find content faster based on its meaning. Semantic Navigation is now also available as part of Web Experience Management.
* Open Text Capture Center (from Captaris): Fully integrates imaging and optical character recognition components.
* Open Text Media Management (from Artesia): Open Text has also integrated Open Text Media Management with Web Experience Management.

"The chaos and risks of content in organisations continues to grow but we've focused on innovation to help our customers meet those challenges," commented Open Text Chief Technology Officer Eugene Roman. Open Text has aggressively moved to a services-based architecture and implemented sophisticated development processes that enable us to quickly and efficiently integrate new and future functionality no matter if organically developed or acquired. As the biggest R&D achievement in Open Text's history, ECM Suite 2010 will help our customers easily plan their future ECM strategies."

ECM Suite 2010 includes expanded features to improve social collaboration and mobility, manage compliance and enrich the user experience, so users can work faster, while driving productivity and ROI for organisations. Social collaboration is embedded into the fabric of ECM Suite 2010, offering capabilities such as discussions, forums and wikis. Open Text Pulse allows ECM Suite users to engage in microblogging, follow co-workers, share content, find subject-matter experts, all in a compelling interface that helps users be productive. As part of the ECM Suite, these social media capabilities can be fully secured and managed under compliance rules.

John Tropea, Global Facilitator, Communities of Practice for global engineering firm Hatch, added: "I like that Open Text Pulse allows you to interact and build discussions around a document rather than in a separate place like e-mail. All the micro-decisions that went into a deliverable are now recorded by default - the real corporate memory."

For interoperability with existing content repositories and applications across a large enterprise, ECM Suite 2010 provides support for the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard. This allows customers to access content from CMIS-certified systems and content repositories. Likewise, CMIS-compliant applications can access content in the Enterprise Library.

ECM Suite 2010 also adds support for all three major virtualisation environments: VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and Oracle Virtualisation.

Knowing the importance of a great experience to drive viral adoption, reduce training, and help users work faster, Open Text made significant user interface changes in ECM Suite 2010 based on the latest Web standards, continuing to make the software more intuitive, customisable and extendable to mobile devices. The new design lets users customise their experience, using custom columns, hiding unnecessary menus and creating personalised filters. To further support user adoption, the search experience has been enhanced, and Open Text has also added facetted browsing, which lets users leverage metadata to navigate through vast volumes of content.

With ECM Suite 2010, Open Text also developed multilingual metadata, language interface switching and the ability for customers to localise the application language to their organisation using company-specific dictionaries.

Performance improvements in ECM Suite 2010 also add to user adoption through faster response time, and by serving up relevant content and search results incredibly fast, so that users can quickly navigate and organise content. Open Text also added speed and performance improvements in other areas, for example, in records management where large-scale records dispositions, which used to take 2.5 hours of processing time in benchmark tests, can now be done in 15 seconds, adding to the company's traditional strength in information governance.

Performance improvements at the server level mean that a smaller number of server instances need to be deployed to support the same level of scalability, freeing up capacity for more functional components on the existing infrastructure environment. The thorough optimisation of the ECM Suite code results in much higher throughput rates in benchmark tests.

Many of the fundamental ideas that drove the development of ECM Suite 2010 are captured in a new ECM book called Managing Content in the Cloud, where Open Text Executive Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer Tom Jenkins talks about how ECM is forever changing the way organisations do business. The book prescribes effective solutions, looks at key technologies, and includes 50 innovator stories of how Open Text users are using the ECM Suite to solve problems.

For further information, please contact Rob Shaw: tel +27 83 626-3811, fax +27 86 646-4178, e-mail rshaw@opentext.com