OpenText Upgrades Enterprise Content ManagementOpenText Upgrades Enterprise Content Management

Open Text released the latest version of its enterprise content management product, ECM Suite 2010, including expanded features designed to improve social collaboration and mobility, manage compliance, enable users to work faster and more productively, and increase return on investment.

ECM Suite 2010 adds functionality through linked integration points for more than 90 products and modules, Open Text said. As a result, customers can manage an array of content types, applications, languages, user needs, and business processes, the company said.

The suite's core services layer includes process services, user interface services, and the Enterprise Library, formerly LiveLink, which features integrated archiving, metadata management, search, and records management, said Open Text. ECM Suite 2010 also adds support for virtualization environments VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Oracle Virtualization.

"The chaos and risks of content in organizations continues to grow but we've focused on innovation to help our customers meet those challenges," said Eugene Roman, Open Text chief technology officer. "Over the past several years, 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."

Organizations looking to manage the wealth of unstructured content increasingly are interested in ECM, said Stephen Powers, principal analyst at Forrester, in the introduction to a July report.

"Enterprises want three things from ECM: to help make content more findable and more actionable; to mitigate content-related risks and aid compliance efforts; and to make content available for external constituencies, such as customers, partners, and prospects," he wrote. "The ECM suite remains the ideal for most IT organizations. But in reality companies use a variety of solutions from multiple vendors to handle business, transactional, and persuasive content."

ECM Suite 2010 adds capabilities from acquired technologies to strengthen its abilities. The suite integrates Vignette products such as Open Text Portal, Open Text Web Experience Management, Open Text Media Management, and Open Text Social Communities. It also includes Nstein's Open Text Analytics, Semantic Navigation, Captaris' Open Text Capture Center, and Artesia's Open Text Media Management.

The solution incorporates social collaboration via built-in capabilities for discussions, wikis, and forums. The suite's Open Text Pulse lets users microblog, follow colleagues, share content, and find experts. Corporations can fully secure and manage these social media capabilities under compliance rules, Open Text said.

"I like that Open Text Pulse allows you to interact and build discussions around a document rather than in a separate place like email," said John Tropea, global facilitator of communities of practice at engineering firm Hatch. "All the micro-decisions that went into a deliverable are now recorded by default -- the real corporate memory."

In addition, ECM Suite 2010 supports the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard, allowing users to access content from CMIS-certified systems and content repositories. CMIS-compliant applications also can access content housed in the Enterprise Library.

Users can customize their experiences by hiding unnecessary menus, creating personalized filters, and using custom columns. Open Text added facetted browsing and enhanced the search experience, the vendor said. The suite also includes multilingual metadata and language interface switching and lets users localize the application language to their businesses using company-specific dictionaries.

Open Text dramatically improved processing speed: In records management, for example, a task that used to take 2.5 hours in benchmark tests now takes 15 seconds, according to Open Text. The company accomplished this enhancement by making performance improvements at the server level, meaning that a smaller number of server instances are required.