Open Text Announces Open Interchange Architecture

Open Text extends Livelink, the industry leading collaborative e-business platform, to support integration with enterprise portal development tools.

Waterloo, ON - 2000-08-01 - Open Text Corporation (Nasdaq: OTEX, TSE: OTC), the leading provider of collaborative intranet, extranet and e-business applications, today introduced the Open Interchange Architecture (OIA). One of the key elements of the OIA is an extensible environment designed to integrate Livelink® with portal development frameworks, providing a single point of access to content, legacy applications and structured information essential to e-business processes.

The OIA will enable Open Text to capitalize on new partnerships and strategic relationships with third party portal vendors, offering customers innovative opportunities in constructing their e-business solutions. From a corporate gains perspective, the OIA facilitates a shift in focus from competition to collaboration, a previously untapped method of winning new customers.

The OIA is now available as part of the myLivelink collaborative knowledge portal to enable customers to integrate the powerful collaborative capabilities of Livelink with third party portal development platforms. Using industry standards XML for data interchange and CORBA for distributed computing, the OIA ensures interoperability between collaboration, front-end interfaces and devices, and back-end systems and applications. Specifically, the OIA enables customers to:

• Extend single point access to legacy data and applications supported by third party portal development tools.
• Access robust myLivelink controls that provide connections to key Livelink collaborative tools, such as discussions, tasks, and project workspaces, directly from third party portals.
• Take advantage of the best-of-breed portal access to Livelink without having to deal with the challenges of custom development and the support of their own controls for Livelink information access.
• Easily deploy additional Livelink portal controls by adding them to myLivelink, including any new controls released with myLivelink.
• Reduce administration requirements by providing virtually all myLivelink administration within the third party portals.
• Create highly scaleable collaborative applications through a distributed architecture that spans multiple portal servers and Livelink instances.

According to Alan Weintraub of the Gartner Group, "A new model for e-business applications is emerging. The model called collaborative commerce moves beyond simple information sharing to achieve dynamic collaboration among employees, business partners and customers throughout a trading community or market." Open Text's Open Interchange Architecture (OIA) provides the essential framework to bring together interactions and business processes that support e-business transactions.

"The Open Interchange Architecture (OIA) creates added value for Open Text customers. Existing clients have the ability to extend Livelink to deploy e-business applications that provide a single point of access to both content and other mission critical business information," stated Andrew Pery, Vice President of Global Marketing, Open Text Corporation. "Future customers who have already deployed a portal development framework can seamlessly integrate Livelink, gaining access to such capabilities as virtual project workspaces, business process automation, enterprise group scheduling, and information retrieval."

About myLivelink

myLivelink is the leading collaborative knowledge portal solution for business. It connects users to information from within their enterprise business systems, intranets, extranets and global e-community-all from a single Web interface. Using myLivelink, users can filter and access information from selected sources, set up virtual teams, collaborate on projects, and participate in discussions across the globe-without leaving the desktop. A 'hub' for navigating and accessing a variety of information sources, myLivelink enables users to personalize access to corporate information, industry data, enterprise business systems, consumer links, e-mail, conferencing, calendaring, forms processing, news feeds, and more.

About Livelink

Livelink is a highly scaleable e-business application. Its richly-featured enterprise services include virtual team collaboration, business process automation, enterprise group scheduling and information retrieval services, all tightly integrated into a solution that is easily customized and extended. Livelink is essential to the effective management and development of communities of interest that span organizations and industries. For everything from the creation of complex e-community relationships to the automation of simple e-business processes, Livelink delivers true dynamic collaboration between individuals, organizations, and large trading communities. Livelink servers are fully Web-based and open-architected to ensure rapid deployment and easy access to its full functionality through a standard Web browser.

About Open Text

Open Text has pioneered the development of innovative intranet, extranet and e-Business applications. Since creating one of the first search engines to index the World Wide Web, the Company has remained at the forefront of Internet-based technologies. Today, Open Text solutions allow individuals, teams, organizations, and global trading communities to collaborate on projects, share ideas and accelerate innovation to the fastest possible speed. We call it HyperInnovation and it is already a major factor in the success of leading Global 2000 organizations. Open Text has become the largest supplier of collaborative, Web-based e-Business applications for the enterprise, with over 3.5 million users in 31 countries, speaking 12 languages throughout the world. For more information, visit www.opentext.com.

Trademark

Copyright © 2000 by Open Text Corporation. Livelink, 'Effective Solutions. Driven By Vision. Powered By Innovation.', HyperInnovation, b2bScene.com, and Open Text are trademarks or registered trademarks of Open Text Corporation., Inc. This list is not exhaustive. Other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Release Disclaimer

This news release may contain forward-looking statements relating to the deployment of Livelink and myLivelink by customers, and future performance of Open Text Corporation. Forward-looking statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially. These risks and uncertainties include, among others, risks involved in the completion and integration of acquisitions, the possibility of technical, logistical or planning issues in connection with deployments, the continuous commitment of the Company's customers and other risks detailed from time to time in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), including the final prospectus for the Company's initial public offering of common stock in January 1996, Form 10-K for the years ended June 30, 1998, and June 30, 1999, and Form 10-Q for the quarters ended September 30, 1999, December 31, 1999 and March 31, 2000. Forward-looking statements are based on management's beliefs and opinions at the time the statements are made, and the Company does not undertake any obligations to update forward-looking statements should circumstances or management's beliefs or opinions change.

For more information, please contact

Margaret E. Dobbin
Director, Industry Analyst Relations
Open Text Corporation
+1-519-888-7111 ext.2410
mdobbin@opentext.com