Open Text Unveils Enterprise 2.0 Strategy

Comprehensive Strategy Will Help Organizations Accelerate Social Computing, Embrace Web 2.0, Advance Collaboration and Ensure Compliance; Company Announces New Solutions As Part of Broader 2.0 Strategy

- 2008-03-03 - AIIM Conf. & Expo 2008, Boston; CeBIT 2008, Hannover - Open Text Corporation (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTC), a global leader in enterprise content management (ECM), today unveiled its Enterprise 2.0 strategy designed to help customers transform their organizations with powerful social computing tools. Open Text is taking its collaboration and Web solutions offerings to a new level, providing 2.0 capabilities -- wikis, forums, blogs, tagging, moderation, communities and real-time collaboration -- that are persuasive, productive and integrated into business processes, while still respecting compliance initiatives.

Web 2.0 technologies have redefined the Web as a platform to harness collective intelligence. Applied in the enterprise, organizations can achieve a future desired state of Enterprise 2.0, where its internal and external web sites and applications get better the more people use them. Application of these new technologies creates more engaging Web experiences, improves knowledge sharing and collaboration, increases employee productivity and helps improve brand loyalty and interaction.

Leveraging its existing Web 2.0 solutions based on its market leading web content management offering, Open Text will provide a comprehensive set of new solutions to better address the broad range of 2.0 requirements. These solutions are aimed at collaboration and social computing requirements behind the firewall as a natural extension of customers' current ECM initiatives (ensuring a tight link to existing content and processes), as well as Web 2.0 enablement of public websites, intranets and extranets.

"In order to be successful, customers must view Enterprise 2.0 within the context of their ECM strategies," said Bill Forquer, Executive Vice President of Marketing at Open Text. "Our ECM leadership is based on advocating a holistic approach, where content originating from multiple sources and repositories can be effectively managed, reused and delivered across the enterprise. An effective Enterprise 2.0 strategy requires a similar holistic approach that factors in all the 2.0 content being created."

Forquer adds, "Many organizations treated email as special content outside their ECM strategy. Consequently, this silo treatment has degenerated email repositories into unmanaged chaos and unquantifiable risk. There is no need to repeat that experience with emerging 2.0 content and rich media."

Open Text has the credentials to help organizations take this holistic approach for their Enterprise 2.0 aspirations, according to Forquer, "We have a track record of innovation in web-centricity, collaboration and search. We're also leaders in helping organizations apply records and archiving rules to content across many systems, from email to SharePoint to SAP to Oracle to our own content repositories. We can bring a holistic view of content that can tie Enterprise 2.0 into the broader ECM context, so that 2.0 content to be managed."

The fundamental elements of Open Text's Enterprise 2.0 strategy include:


  • Experience Optimization: Optimize the end user experience through personalization, language preferences, analytics, voting, tagging, blogs and moderation.

  • Workgroup Optimization: Optimize collaborative applications that enhance the variety of workgroup structures in an organization such as teams, projects, communities of practice and program offices.

  • Enterprise 2.0 Content Management: Provide flexible use of wikis, forums, blogs, tagging, and real-time collaboration. Provide advanced handling of rich-media content, with special emphasis on video, which is quickly becoming the de-facto format for 2.0 style work.

  • Make Enterprise 2.0 Content Safe: Manage Enterprise 2.0 content holistically alongside other content repositories providing a consistent implementation of archiving, disposition, retention and compliance policies.

  • Find Before Search: Intuitively find and deliver information relevant to the user s then-current context and present that information without the user explicitly searching for the same.

    In line with its Enterprise 2.0 strategy, Open Text is emphasizing product development and technology directions that support 2.0 fundamentals, with areas of focus that include:


  • Meta-Data to Underpin Experience Optimization: Deeper levels of meta-data handling will enrich the user experience. This includes richer meta-data handling for content, but with particular emphasis on richer meta-data for people and processes as well. It also includes blending the best of both top-down taxonomies with bottom-up tags.

  • Relationships: Graphing interactions between people, processes and content that can reveal implicit, sometimes hidden, relationships that can be used to optimize business processes.

  • Workgroups: Adapting technology to improve workgroup effectiveness. Additional workgroups include committees, governance boards, escalation teams, and exception management. This also includes blending collaborative escalation and exception handling within high-throughput applications such as Accounts Payable.

  • Classification: Improved intuition to auto-classify content, particularly drawing on past user behaviors and current context.

  • Email Analytics: Building on classifications and graphing interaction, introduce or extend tools that reduce our email dependency and burden, such as auto-promotion of email threads to blogs.

    New Offerings Accelerate 2.0 Adoption
    In a separate release today, Open Text is announcing Livelink ECM - Extended Collaboration, a solution designed to provide the building blocks to help Livelink ECM customers implement 2.0 technologies.

    In September, Open Text also announced a set of solutions for its RedDot Web Content Management suite that help customers 2.0-enable public websites, intranets and extranets.

    AIIM Conference & Expo 2008, CeBIT 2008 Conference
    Open Text is announcing its Enterprise 2.0 news in conjunction with the AIIM Conference this week in Boston, where Open Text is exhibiting in booth #3221, and at the CeBIT 2008 Conference in Hannover, Germany, where Open Text is exhibiting in booth #D09, Hall 3.

    About Open Text

    Open Text, an enterprise software company and leader in enterprise content management, helps organizations manage and gain the true value of their business content. Open Text brings two decades of expertise supporting 46,000 customers and millions of users in 114 countries. Working with our customers and partners, we bring together leading Content Experts&trade to help organizations capture and preserve corporate memory, increase brand equity, automate processes, mitigate risk, manage compliance and improve competitiveness. For more information, visit www.opentext.com.

    Safe Harbor Statement Under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995

    This news release may contain forward-looking statements relating to the success of any of the Company's strategic initiatives, the Company's growth and profitability prospects, the benefits of the Company's products to be realized by customers, the Company's position in the market and future opportunities therein, the deployment of Livelink and our other products by customers, and future performance of Open Text Corporation. Forward-looking statements may also include, without limitation, any statement relating to future events, conditions or circumstances. Forward-looking statements in this release are not promises or guarantees and are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially. The risks and uncertainties that may affect forward-looking statements include, among others, the failure to develop new products, risks involved in fluctuations in currency exchange rates, delays in purchasing decisions of customers, 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, demand for the Company's products and other risks detailed from time to time in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), including the Form 10-K for the year ended June 30, 2008 You should not place undue reliance upon any such forward-looking statements, which 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.

    Copyright© 2008 by Open Text Corporation. LIVELINK ECM and OPEN TEXT are trademarks or registered trademarks of Open Text Corporation in the United States of America, Canada, the European Union and/or other countries. This list of trademarks is not exhaustive. Other trademarks, registered trademarks, product names, company names, brands and service names mentioned herein are property of Open Text Corporation or other respective owners.

    For more information, please contact

    Richard Maganini
    Open Text Corporation
    +1-847-267-9330 ext.4266
    rmaganin@opentext.com

    Stephanie Dodge
    Open Text Corporation
    519-888-7111, x2429
    sdodge@opentext.com

    Brian Edwards
    McKenzie Worldwide
    +1-503-577-4583
    briane@mckenzieworldwide.com