Web 2.0 has moved from the fringes of the cyberworld into the consumer mainstream, as more people become comfortable with online communication channels. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and blogs are the new modes of building and maintaining social connections and self-expression. Outlets like YouTube and Flickr provide the forum to upload videos and images for others to consume and share.

Right about now, you might be wondering how this is really relevant in the business world. It’s relevant because organizations, like yours, are hiring a new generation of workers who use these technologies every day, and they’re going to want to continue to use them, or something like them, at work. Like it or not, the 2.0 phenomenon is entering the workplace as Enterprise 2.0, creating not only a shift in technology, but also a cultural shift. Organizations need to adapt.

Many companies have started using 2.0 technology to create more engaging internal and external web sites and customer communities that can advance customer and partner connections. As the technologies find their way deeper into the enterprise, they become powerful tools for employee collaboration and knowledge sharing. We released a podcast today on the 2.0 phenomenon and its impact on organizations, featuring our own Tom Jenkins, Open Text Executive Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer.

Recently at the AIIM Conference & Expo in Boston, we announced Open Text’s plans to help organizations take full advantage of social collaboration tools, such as wikis, forums, blogs, tagging, communities and real-time chat, while managing related content within the context of an organization’s broader ECM strategy, including business processes and compliance initiatives.

As part of the news, we also announced Livelink ECM – Extended Collaboration, which delivers a range of communities, social computing and real-time collaboration tools in Livelink ECM aimed at furthering employee collaboration and knowledge sharing. Livelink ECM – Extended Collaboration complements our web content management solutions which lets customers Web 2.0-enable their public websites, intranets and extranets.

We think the time is right for Enterprise 2.0 and over the next few months we’ll be offering more tools to help organizations effectively move forward in this space, while addressing compliance issues. Stay tuned.

Resources:

Information Page: Livelink ECM – Extended Collaboration
Podcast: Opening Up Open Text with Online Communities
Podcast: Social Media and Compliance

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.

Open Text is a proud Silver Sponsor of what has emerged as one of the must-attend conferences in the Enterprise Content Management space: Gartner’s PCC. Since the kick off show in 2006, this conference has become a showcase for thought leadership in the content management arena – watching tomorrow’s trends yet balanced by solid real-world implementation advice for best practices hungry attendees.

The session tracks: Portals and User Experience; Content Management and Compliance; ROI, Governance and Justification; Collaboration and Innovation deliver a solid stack of recommendations and often push attendees to think beyond the bits and bytes into how software choices can affect the business they support.

What has struck us as interesting so far? (Besides the dreamy red velvet cupcakes at afternoon break….) That more than one analyst has called for technology creators and deliverers to think about the implications of their software and content management decisions. Paying attention to end-user participation rates as a measure of success, of realizing how the move into online business practices have changed the game of brand and reputation management, how governance is emerging as corporate objective that needs to be abstracted from the individual software tools people adopt and discard as their content creation needs change, how policy must shadow innovation and balance the productivity needs of content creators with best practices needed to serve corporate requirements.

It was gratifying to hear many of the Gartner presenters articulate that their session content was directly driven by the questions, concerns and anxieties voiced by their customer inquiries over the year – content is timely, current and developed to answer real-world content management issues. Also gratifying to hear Open Text positioned as a leader in the collaborative content management space – as the leading pureplay ECM vendor delivering proven and tested Content-Enabled Vertical Applications to organizations who need more than basic content services to support the needs of their global enterprise.

If you’re reading this and are at the show this week, come see us in Booth T http://agendabuilder.gartner.com/pcc4/webpages/VendorDetail.aspx?vendor=23. We’d love to have a conversation and understand your content management challenges. Tell us how you’re getting ready for Enterprise 2.0.