Open Text unveils revolutionary new user interface paradigm with customisable views of business content

Issued by Global Research Partners for Enterprise Content & Wireless

Johannesburg, 31 Oct 2007

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 the latter`s Open Text Enterprise Connect, a revolutionary user interface paradigm designed to empower information workers to access and interact with all their business content, applications, and processes from within their familiar desktop applications, including Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), Microsoft Explorer, Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes.

Open Text Enterprise Connect is one of three new content services, which forms the basis for Open Text`s next-generation content management framework, which takes a unique, repository-agnostic approach to ECM, eliminating the content and process silos created by different systems by decoupling the user experience from the underlying information repositories.

With Enterprise Connect, information workers can easily interact with content from multiple repositories and applications, drag and drop objects between repositories, initiate workflows, and apply metadata and records classifications to objects.

At the core of Enterprise Connect is a framework which allows organisations to deliver to information workers content in context, leveraging customisable business views. Its extensible plug-in architecture and software development kit decouples the user experience from the underlying content repositories, providing seamless access to all business content.

Leveraging the business views, Open Text partners and customers will be able to design and deploy content-enabled applications with much greater speed, eliminating the development effort for an application interface.

Enterprise Connect`s powerful plug-in architecture facilitates rapid deployment of applications through a universal client, leveraging single-sign-on technology. Training is minimised because the application looks like a natural extension of the preferred user interface.

Plug-ins are available to access and interact with content stored in Open Text content repositories, SAP applications and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server repositories.

"Enterprise Connect overcomes usability and user adoption challenges, by allowing us to bring the application to the user in a more user-centred and familiar way, rather than forcing them to learn how to work in a completely new interface," said Steve Miller, Chief Architect & Information Strategist for Strategic Innovators, an Open Text partner specialising in usability focused information management strategy and solutions for the energy sector.

"The ability to easily develop and add plug-ins to expose content from multiple business applications is very powerful. And what makes it a killer-app is the ability to allow the end-user to interact with the system in the most straightforward business centric way, customising the interaction such that usability and efficiency are greatly enhanced.

"Using the out-of-the box framework, business users can customise the way content is presented and delivered. This significantly reduces dependencies on IT and empowers managers, who best understand their business challenges, to deliver applications to staff in tailored user environments. The plug-in architecture allows customers and partners like us to develop more in-depth solutions, such as our prototype plug-in for Well File Management, targeted at specific business needs with a repository-agnostic approach."

"Our customers have myriad different interfaces and many different systems, which support the business," commented Kirk Roberts, President of Livelink ECM Division at Open Text.

"Open Text Enterprise Connect enables organisations to simplify the user experience by aggregating every type of business content and bringing it to the desktop in a logical, business-centric view, customised to a user`s role, all inside the Microsoft desktop environment."

Open Text Enterprise Connect`s rich software development kit (SDK) makes it easy for customers, third-party developers and system integrators to deliver any content-centric application to users at the desktop in the same familiar interface. The SDK includes .NET and C++ base classes, plus source documentation, source code and a variety of tools that will help organisations to easily develop custom solutions and plug-in applications for Enterprise Connect quickly and efficiently.

For further information, please contact Ray Dalgarno at Lava Systems Africa: tel 011 675-7193, fax 011 675-4075, e-mail rayd@lavasystems.co.za.

Enterprise Content and Wireless (ECW)

ECW is the merged entity of Lava Systems Africa and Lava Systems Mobile (LSM).

The Lava Systems Africa (LSA) team originated in the late 1990s with the objective of becoming a premier supplier of enterprise systems based around knowledge management, document management, records management, image management, collaboration and workflow solutions. The emerging demands that were identified included government process re-engineering, supply chain co-ordination, customer relationship management, e-government and B2B processing. In support of these business aims the technology platforms chosen had to enjoy a proven global track record and adhere to open Internet architecture standards and developments. LSA is a South African-based company dedicated to the sales, marketing, support and consultancy founded upon the Livelink product suite from Open Text, a product that the staff has been involved with since 1998. LSA user base embraces customers from both the private and public sector and includes organisations such as Bateman Projects Limited, Alexander Forbes, the Gauteng Provincial Government and the National Social Security Fund of Uganda.

Lava Systems Mobile, a company focusing on the development of mobile applications and tools, was originally created in 2005 and later that year absorbed KeyTools, a well established mobile applications software developer with international links.

Editorial contacts