Open Text Corp. released the traditional raft of announcements at their annual LiveLinkUp conference in Orlando, Florida today. Here are the highlights from the Open Text website:
Open Text Content Services enable information workers to manage and exploit all content types in a unified way at three critical levels and are comprised of the following core elements:
Open Text Enterprise Connect – a revolutionary new user interface paradigm with customizable views of business content.
Open Text Enterprise Process Services – offering a comprehensive set of enterprise process services to help organizations put content in the hands of users when and where they need it – in the context of the business process they are supporting.
Open Text Enterprise Library Services – providing a trusted repository to consistently enforce and manage retention schedules, corporate governance, and regulatory compliance policies for all content types enterprise-wide.
What strikes me about these announcements (which you can find here) is that they all seem to be a response to the emergence of Microsoft as a force in the ECM market. Some may say that this is a sign of weakness on the part of Open Text (i.e. that they’ve completely given up on the UI) but I see it as a bridge to a future where best-of-breed ECM applications are tied together.
First off, they haven’t given up on the UI; the Enterprise Connect tool improves access to the Livelink repository from desktop applications and browser interfaces alike and provides a drag-and-drop capabilities between platforms and repositories. Even if organizations find that SharePoint or another application offers a more user-friendly front end, Open Text is positioning themselves as an interface-agnostic repository of record. I think it’s a smart move and, frankly, one in which Open Text had little choice.
As everyone in the ECM industry knows, Microsoft is making a big push into the ECM space with MOSS and have done an excellent job of selling the collaborative capabilities of the tool. Where SharePoint currently falls down is in its ability to meet hard-core compliance and records management requirements. Tools like the ones on offer by Open Text help bridge that gap and should keep the company relevant for some time to come.
Does this mean that Microsoft will never have an enterprise-class RM tool? Or that MOSS won’t start to displace some pure-play SOX compliance tools? Definitely not, because they will at some point. However, I see this as a long and winding road and that organizations are better off to pursue a coexistence strategy until such time as best practice about the deployment of SharePoint as a tool that can help organizations meet stringent regulatory requirements is more widely known.
At the end of the day, I see this as an opportunity. The Open Text Content Services toolset allows organizations to take a best-of-both-worlds approach to ECM. Companies get to take advantage of the slick user experience of SharePoint (slickest when Office 2007 is in use) but can still rely on the tried and true records management, audit and regulatory compliance features of Livelink.
I’ll be talking more about this topic at the Calgary AIIM Conference which is coming next week on November 1st and 2nd. You can find out more about the event and sign up here. Hope to see you there.
So you think the DoD 5015.2 certification MOSS got a while back isin’t enough to be qualified as “enterprise-class RM tool”?
Comment by l.v. — November 28, 2007 @ 6:58 am
I guess I want to see these tools in action. Also, so far as I’m aware, the DoD service pack has yet to be widely released. For something as critical as records management, applying established best practice is the best way to ensure success. This isn’t to say that MOSS won’t ever get there in terms of records management, I just believe that for the next short while established players like Open Text will continue to dominate the “structured unstructured content management” market.
Comment by Greg Clark — December 3, 2007 @ 6:11 am