ECM Briefs

Over the last few weeks, we have been attending a series of events where we’ve touted new things we are doing with Microsoft. At LegalTech New York, we announced a new solution for law firms called Legal Information Management, SharePoint Edition and at Microsoft’s Office Developer Conference, we introduced a solution that lets developers create case management applications for SharePoint, called Case Management Framework, SharePoint Edition. There’s more on the way in the weeks ahead.

If you’re wondering why Open Text is working on all these things for SharePoint, take a look at a recent article from Computerworld Canada which, in a report on our Case Management Framework, provided a good perspective. In the article, one analyst points out that many organizations are looking at SharePoint as a centralized user interface or collaborative infrastructure they want to build on. If customers want to use SharePoint as the principal place where people work online, we are leading the market in delivering solutions that help customers extend the power of SharePoint in that role. We’re doing this at two levels: Providing business process and/or vertical-market specific ECM applications that work on top of SharePoint; and providing enterprise-scale records management and archiving capabilities that can support a company’s SharePoint sites. Recently, Evan Richman of Microsoft and I recorded a podcast where we discussed how the two companies work together to deliver combined solutions that are paying off for customers.

Our success with Microsoft validates Open Text’s position in the market as an ECM-focused company that can offer customers content management expertise gained over many years to extend the infrastructure of their choice.

Open Text often is asked whether our SharePoint related product portfolio is competitive with our traditional Livelink ECM content management offering, and increasingly we realize that it is not. Customers today are interested in richer end-to-end content lifecycle management: not mere check-in/check-out basic library services. By incorporating SharePoint authored content into our broader ECM strategy, we give our customers choice. Customers choose the content infrastructure that best fits their broader IT strategy – any combination of SAP, Oracle, IBM or Microsoft – and Open Text will help them solve their content management challenges leveraging this infrastructure. In this context, as Office 2007 gains traction, it only makes sense to take advantage of all of its new capabilities and provide easy solutions to bring this content into our broader ECM portfolio.

Organizations currently managing key information within Office SharePoint Server 2007 may also want to offer an experience driven Web environment that can increase the value of content within their document library. We made this a possibility today with our announcement of the release of RedDot’s Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Document Management Integration. Read more here.

The bottom line: Customers need flexibility to create an ECM strategy that fits the needs of their users. We are working to give them that flexibility.