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What is Content Integration?

Overview

Information challenges continue to plague organizations, with content sprawl, information chaos, and digital friction putting a stranglehold on productivity. To enable teams to work smarter together, employees need easy, fast access to all relevant content beyond individual siloed systems.

Content integration is a type of business integration that brings together business applications and systems—and the content within—allowing information, data, and processes to seamlessly flow back and forth.

Because improved access to information boosts productivity, content integration helps individuals work more efficiently and effectively, improving collaboration, reducing redundant tasks, empowering business processes, and putting information at users’ fingertips. Employees gain a complete view of information within the business systems they use every day, such as applications from SAP®, SAP SuccessFactors®, Microsoft® 365, and Salesforce®.

Content Integration

How are enterprise application integration and content integration related?

Enterprise application integration (EAI) is the process of integrating business applications and systems, such as ERP, CRM, and HCM, to interact and exchange data. This enables organizations to make better use of existing data, remove silos, and drive efficiency gains. Common EAI approaches may involve enterprise integration platforms, APIs, and middleware, based on organizational requirements. Other situations may call for a more direct path: integrating information management solutions into the lead business applications.

Content integration can be used to describe certain EAI connections that focus on combining various forms of content. These can include documents, images, forms, and engineering drawings. By integrating this content with structured data from enterprise process applications, a cohesive, unified experience for users becomes possible. Information can flow seamlessly regardless of where and how it’s consumed.

Why should businesses focus on content integration?

Employees are struggling to quickly and easily find the information they need, forced to rely on a plethora of tools and processes, leading to digital friction. To reduce user frustration, manual tasks, and the ongoing hunt for content, content integration brings order to content, breaking down silos and getting more information out of existing data.

Content integration links knowledge to processes, flowing all related information into central workspaces within users’ preferred applications. This gives users a 360-degree view of business information relevant to their daily tasks, maximizing the value of application investments. As a result, user experience and process efficiencies are optimized, creating a connected, high-value information ecosystem.

What are common challenges tied to content integration?

While organizations recognize the need to deliver information when and where needed by leveraging content integration, there are several challenges potentially holding them back. These include concerns such as: 

  • Ease of use for employees: The goal is to enable employees to work smarter, not harder, with businesses desiring a user-friendly and intuitive interface to drive, not hinder, adoption. 
  • Widespread content formats and business systems: Information is typically siloed across various repositories, systems, and departments, and comprised of numerous data formats, with content integration activities needing to seamlessly support all content regardless of where it resides. 
  • Security: Organizations want to ensure data is properly protected, applying the same high-level of data security and privacy controls currently governing information.
  • Complex workflows: Engraining business processes within individual departments and teams can create concerns about disruption to existing workflows that hinder innovation and collaboration. 
  • Scalability: Content integrations need to evolve with the business, able to scale and support new content demands, use cases, and user needs. 
  • Deep integrations: Will integrations centralize content and workflows across large, legacy enterprise platforms, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), human capital management (HCM), and customer relationship management (CRM), to maximize existing investments?

How do content integrations drive productivity?

Content integration allows organizations to operate more efficiently and effectively, introducing greater agility to stay competitive, innovate faster, and jump on growth opportunities. Businesses increase productivity through the ability to:

  • Inform decision-making: Content integration improves data access, shareability, and usability, empowering users with knowledge across the business. 
  • Increase customer satisfaction and loyalty: Deliver an improved, personalized experience for customers by giving teams, such as sales and marketing, a full customer view from a unified system. 
  • Find information fast: Stop wasting time looking for information, taking advantage of GenAI content assistants to find and summarize information quickly, reducing bottlenecks and improving information relevance. 
  • Bring structure to content: Create a unified data and content hub, giving users a 360-degree view of content and related business processes in a single interface.
  • Work better, together: Collaborate across teams and projects with real-time information sharing powered by centralized data. 
  • Free up time for more strategic activities: With information delivered where and when needed, businesses can reduce manual tasks, spot redundancies, and uncover additional areas for improvement—opening the door for more strategic work. 
  • Increase response times: Content integration enables access to real-time information, allowing organizations to adapt more quickly to changing market, customer, and organizational demands. 
  • Smarter operational experience: By addressing operational needs and removing productivity barriers across finance, sales, marketing, and other key areas, content integrations can reduce digital friction in processes fueling your business.

How does OpenText support impactful content integration?

OpenText Content Cloud business integrations drive productivity and enrich processes across all business functions and industries through the use of seamless, intuitive content integrations. With ready-to-use integrations and APIs, OpenText makes it easy to embed content into business applications and drive business performance.

Explore OpenText content integrations and discover how to drive business performance and empower teams:

Content Cloud integrations for SAP solutions
Seamlessly connect your SAP business processes with OpenText™ Content Cloud SAP integrations to create a unified information ecosystem. They enable users to access, manage, and share critical documents and content directly within SAP interfaces, eliminating content silos and providing a 360-degree view of business information relevant to SAP workflows. Improve decision-making and operational efficiency by linking SAP transactions with supporting documentation and content.  

Content Cloud integrations for Salesforce
Enhance your customer relationship management with OpenText Content Cloud Salesforce integrations, which allow sales, marketing, and service teams to access a complete customer view from a unified system. Manage customer documents, contracts, and communications directly within Salesforce, improving collaboration, accelerating sales cycles, and delivering more personalized customer experiences through contextual content access.

Content Cloud integrations for Microsoft 365
Maximize your Microsoft investment with OpenText Content Cloud integration with Microsoft 365. Users can access, manage, and collaborate on business content directly within familiar Microsoft applications like Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint. These integrations bring enterprise-grade content management to everyday productivity tools, enabling secure document sharing, version control, and compliance management while maintaining the intuitive Microsoft 365 experience.

OpenText Content Management for SAP SuccessFactors and OpenText Core Content Management for SAP SuccessFactors
Streamline HR document management and improve employee experiences with HR integration from OpenText™ Content Management for SAP SuccessFactors® or OpenText™ Core Content Management for SAP SuccessFactors®. Centralize employee documentation, automate document-centric workflows, and ensure compliance throughout the employee lifecycle. HR teams can efficiently manage employee records, onboarding materials, policies, and other vital HR content while providing secure self-service access to information for employees and managers, reducing manual tasks and focusing HR professionals on more strategic activities.

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Content Cloud integrations for SAP Solutions

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Content Cloud integrations for Salesforce

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OpenText™ Content Management for SAP SuccessFactors

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Content Cloud integrations for Microsoft 365

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Content Cloud industry solutions

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Footnotes