ECM Briefs

Not a whole lot happened this week since it's Thanksgiving in the US, but we do have a few good things to recap:

• According to Deb Lavoy: social media is not a strategy

• Later in the week Deb Lavoy had a meeting of the minds

• Alison Clarke spoke more about contract management in her webinar Effective Contract Management is Just Smart Business

We hope you all had a great Thanksgiving!

Missed some of our Conversations and News this week? Here's a recap:

• An independent analyst report positions Open Text as a leader in Enterprise Content Management
• We give a few highlights here and here from Content World
• A new podcast explains how content-enriched business processes from SAP deliver rapid ROI
• Guest blogger Alison Clarke writes about making contracts count
• Open Text deepened its integration with SAP® Solutions across the ECM Suite with content-enriched business processes
• Martin Sumner-Smith says sometimes the biggest changes sneak up on you

With the dust settling behind such a whirlwind week, we're happy to say that Content World welcomed over 1,200 attendees at our annual event. A big thanks to all customers, partners and staff for the great participation.

Conference highlights of the five day event include:

• The annual Partner Day for Open Text partners
• A training program which featured over 30 workshops and courses and 360 enrollments
• A standing ovation for the keynote address from Wired Magazine's Rave Award Winner, Dr. Michael Wesch
• The 2009 GlobalStar Enterprise and ECM Champion Awards, celebrating individual and Enterprise Award winners
• The General Session from Open Text executives on corporate vision and product strategy, plus a product launch and roadmap release
• Specialized receptions and User Group Days for both industry and product users
• Content World 2010 announced for November 7-12, 2010 in Washington, DC

Miss the conference? We've got you covered.

Over 1200+ tweets were generated on the conference by customers, partners and staff. Find a complete transcript in the Content World 2009 Community. You can watch Content World videos on the Open Text YouTube channel, view our fun set of Flickr photos or join the Community to access presentations and handouts, view videos and the photogallery. Or follow us @OTContentWorld for future announcements.

We'll see you soon in 2010 when OT goes to DC!
Content World 2010 | Washington DC | November 7 - 12, 2010.

-The Content World Team

Below, a few shots from our Flickr gallery:

Gala Dinner Pre-Show

Behind the Scenes of Content World

Keynote Speaker Mike Wesch

Fueling Up

Check out the rest on our Flickr!

If you're not effectively managing your contracts, you're not effectively managing your business.
It's as simple as that. A poorly managed contract leaves money on the table--discounts not taken, performance incentives achieved but unpaid, agreed upon price increases never enforced. Plus, an unmanaged contract is a potential source of regulatory and operational risk.

The Contract--Much More than a Document
Contracts touch virtually every area of the enterprise, defining relationships with partners, suppliers, customers, and even employees. Contracts should protect a business from risk--operational and regulatory--lock in favorable pricing and payment terms with suppliers and customers, define acceptable service levels, and provide enforceable remedies when those terms are breached.

A document that does all that is bound to be complex, and contracts most definitely are. They often stretch to hundreds of pages, with clauses and amendments crafted and vetted by expensive legal teams on both sides of an interaction.

Of course, volume amplifies the management challenges presented by contract complexity. The average number of active contracts in the typical Fortune 1000 company is in the tens of thousands. It's not unusual for large companies to generate hundreds of new contracts every month.

Contract management is where contract intent meets the reality of execution and fulfillment. All organizations manage their contracts in some fashion, but many do it haphazardly, which is to say ineffectively. It is not uncommon to find the business unit or department responsible for creating or executing contracts to be doing so manually, often with home-grown processes that have evolved as much by accident as by intent. There are no procedures for central oversight, no corporate standards, and few enforcement mechanisms. Responsibility is diffused, and so accountability is lax. Plus, once executed, contracts can prove remarkably elusive, difficult, or impossible to locate in a timely manner if at all.

In an effort to overhaul their contract management processes, many organizations look for technology solutions to improve structure and control. The starting point for evaluating a technology solution--contract management or any other--is identifying the biggest pain points the solution needs to address.

On November 24 at 2 p.m. I will be hosting a webinar called: Effective Contract Management is Just Smart Business to identify these pain points and talk about a solution. Feel free to join me!

Alison Clarke is Product Marketing Manager for Enterprise Business Applications at Open Text

In the world of rich media, it was the publishers, broadcasters, and marketing agencies who first found themselves about a decade ago swimming in a sea of digital photos, large digital videos, various types of audio files. Today any organization with a marketing or communications need, by which I mean every organization, has a need to manage rich media - whether it's for talking with customers, partners, or often just their own employees.

Today the content companies are rapidly exploring an important new phase of media management, one in which their content frequently traverses the corporate firewall. They do so because they have found that as compelling as their websites can be, there are many conversations of which they would like to be a part that are taking place across the greater internet, and in particular within both the very large and very small social networks from Twitter and Facebook to alumni and local community forums. The same need is rapidly growing among all companies seeking to be included in the extended conversations that the Web facilitates. However while such content distribution allows organizations to attract customers and interested parties to their core content, to date it has been difficult to track, control, and keep such distributed content up-to-date.

In the very near future, I am pleased to say, companies like Open Text will make available technology that builds on the dramatic progress around content management, distribution, and display over the last few years -- in particular, shared progress around interoperable standards -- so that organizations can now participate in these external discussions without losing control of their content. This notion of being able to monitor and update distributed content in real time no matter where that content may be represents a powerful new phase in content management.

When combined with dramatically improved navigation experience via the introduction of a third dimension to content browsing, the result is likely to be far richer, more interactive, and ultimately not just better and faster content experiences but entirely different experiences. If you are interested in learning more, I will be discussing these trends in more detail, and showing some compelling real world examples, during my session called Distribution and Control: The Next Important Phase of Media Management on November 9 out in LA at the Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management show. Hope to see you there.

Damian Saccocio is VP, Solutions Marketing and Strategy, Enterprise 2.0 at Open Text

Timberland is a global leader in designing, engineering and marketing premium-quality footwear to outdoors-loving consumers. Under the guise of many brands, including Timberland PRO® and Mountain Athletics®, Timberland has offices in North America, the United Kingdom and Asia.

Before Open Text Media Management (formerly Artesia) was introduced, Timberland had no standardized process for storing digital assets. Images were stored on DVDs and shared drives and would eventually become archived by year. There were obvious shortcomings to this type of storage system, particularly with usage rights. With the old system of filing, there was no way to connect the usage rights and other image information with the actual image itself; externally this information is difficult to track down. Also, images on CD or DVD had a tendency to be misplaced, and it was difficult to control global consistency of those images.

It was important to Timberland that the solution selected was compatible with Mac and PC and also that archiving images could be accomplished. It was also critical that the images would be searchable via keyword. After reviewing several systems, Open Text Media Management was chosen because it met the requirements not only of marketing, but of the broader enterprise. Different file types such as logos, videos, layouts, concept designs, and assets could be uploaded in bulk form from the asset management repository. Additionally, the system is centralized in a secure repository for global use and user privileges, release dates, usage rights and restrictions can all be controlled by Timberland based on the assignment of roles and asset groups.

Timberland is impressed by several features of the media management solution: a centralized digital media repository, which they branded Gear Box, provides a visual snapshot of recent projects and photography, which minimizes the chance of teams in different regions duplicating projects. Also, the image conversion and contact sheet creation features are available in three custom one-step downloads, which eliminates the need for proprietary image software for each desktop. When asked what Timberland users like most about the Open Text system, Victoria Dimou, the Creative Director and Art and Copy Group at Timberland, responded, "One-touch, one-click downloads. Quick keyword search. Contact Sheet. Simple navigations. Sets and Collections. All over the Internet."

The Open Text Media Management system has improved productivity and collaboration across the entire enterprise. The system saves time because the images in Gear Box are available immediately. Ravi Vyapuri, IT Application Architect at Timberland concludes, "Now that the media management library is in place, it's really a huge museum of all of our products. We weren't able to store all of these physical assets in a room for people to look at, but now we have a place where people can see the evolution of our products over the years. And that creates a story of our past, and the promise of a future."

For the full story of Timberland's implementation, please read the success story here: http://www.opentext.com/download/livelinkdownload.html?path=/corporate/customer/casestudy/timberland-0909-en.pdf