This is a brief overview of OpenText's 'Content Day' in Toronto yesterday. It was a useful day at the Radisson hotel (booo to them for not providing free wireless !), with good sessions by OpenText staff and some good customer case studies.
So, here are the highlights:
1. Strategic direction / roadmap
They are continuing to move to absorb and integrate all their acquisitions, and are doing this under the auspices of a 'soup to nuts' ECM suite.
By 2010 both LiveLink and HummingBird eDocs will cease to exist as separate products stacks and will be merged into OpenText Content Server 2010, which will be the basis of this ECM suite.
Interestingly their messaging is based on the premise that customer integration of best of breed products is complex, expensive and never lives up to the expectations (which I have to agree with!), while a single monolithic repository and ECM system (think EMC and IBM?) can never be good at everything.
So they have focused on web services and integrating RedDot WCM, Artesia DAM etc via a loosely couple web services architecture. Indeed more than one of their customer case studies noted how easy it had been to integrate LiveLink into other applications / systems.
They provide two 'user experience' alternatives to bring all of this together. 'Bloom' is the code word for their Enterprise 2.0 offering which should be released in the summer - this appears to be aimed at taking on EMC CenterStage and Oracle BeeHive (and maybe SharePoint...?). Bloom is being built on elements of RedDot WCM, Artesia DAM, FirstClass conferencing etc, and all of these historical 'divisions' are being brought together in a new 'front office' unit.
Go to this page on OpenText's site and scroll down and you will find whitepapers on 'Bloom' and Enterprise 2.0: http://www.opentext.com/2/global/enterprise2dot0.htm
What was intereseting though was that they also have a 'fat client' called Enterprise Connect which runs on Windows which can be used to connect to LiveLink, eDocs or SharePoint repositories, thus providing a common interface to these systems. It's interesting to me because its a genuine, 'old fashioned' fat client, not a Adobe AIR or whatever AJAX / JSON type web app.
2. Integrations
Of course OpenText always make a great deal of their relationship with SAP, well they have been partners for 18 years now...... So it obviously works well for them both :-) However this is a well known story and I am not going to concentrate on what they add to SAP.
SharePoint however is flavour of the month (or year, or decade....). OpenText provide a number of SharePoint integrations, and their partnership with Microsoft seems (along with EMC's partnership with MS) seems to be tacit acceptance by MS that SharePoint really is not a full ECM suite, however I digress.
OpenText's base 'Storage Services' integration attacks one of the architectural issues with MOSS, it takes content items out of the SLQ Server RDBMS where they are stored in tables as Binary Large Objects (BLOBS) and puts them into a file system, which is more scalable (and probably considerably cheaper in the long run).
Additional integrations / add ons are more at the user application layer:
- Case Management Framework
- Regulated Documents
- Legal Information Management
So, thats the highlights really. There was some really good customer case studies, and all in all it was an informative and interesting day. I have to say that the re-organisation of divisions and the focusing of the product lines and the marketing on the 'ECM suite' is a necessary move in the face of the competition from EMC, IBM and Oracle, and of course now that Canada is my adopted homeland, I should develop an 'emotional' interest in a great Canadian company ;-)
Yesterday morning I attended this event in downtown Toronto with a colleague from Prescient Digital Media, and it was a jolly good event.
Why ? Because it was not a simple product pitch by OpenText's RedDot web content management division (not that there is anything wrong with technical sales pitch presentations, if they are advertised as such). No, this was an interesting session with some good comments and input from the floor, and even better considering it was a 'Web 2.0' session, the first speaker was Craig Hepburn, who I follow on Twitter and who's blog, 'ForWebSake' is included amongst the resources on my Pageflakes site. Craig presents a great case study on the work he and his colleagues did at his previous employer, STA Travel so I suggest you check out his blog for a practioners viewpoint of the marketing potential of Web 2.0 technologies.
The second session was from Derrick Stanford, a Regional Sales Director on making web 2.0 safe. Again this was a nice overview of the linkage between web 2.0 technologies and the realm of electronic records management, not a salespitch for Livelink per-se, but an interesting discussion of how legislation is not necessarily keeping up with the tech.
So that is what is really interesting to me. Craigs great illustrations of how the use of User Generated Content (UGC) can provide huge benefits for a business, contrasted with questions from the floor about how to protect your business reputation online and how to deal with the pitfalls of blogging and greater user community interaction. This was followed by the ubiquitious discussion of whether or not Facebook should be banned, and how some people don't want to meld their work and personal tools, but that millenials do (or at least many of them) and they want to meld and merge their work and personal tools into a single view of their digital persona.
Personally I think that most people mix some elements of work and non-work life, whether deliberately or not. I mean unless your a deep undercover spy do you really maintain a tight, 'firewalled' seperation between your "9 to 5" and your "social" life ? However do we really need 'one ring to rule them all" ? OpenSocial and other protocols and standards should allow us to syndicate and aggregate and use our platform of choice, be it iGoogle, Pageflakes, Netvibes, Facebook, Ning or LinkedIn etc (even Second Life ??)
Now, add this social, behavioural aspect to the inability of red tape encumbered government beauracracies to keep up with technology, to reform and 'edit' their privacy and data protection laws, and what do we have ? Well a big mess probably, and I am not going to suggest any answers but hopefully I will have provoked my four readers into thinking about this :-)
