Open Text

Open Text said it’s a done deal. The planned acquisition of all of the issued and outstanding shares of Vignette (worth approximately US$ 321 million) has been completed late yesterday following a shareholders’ meeting where the voting and approval took place.While Vignette is busy nostalgizing, Open Text says it’s working on the strategic aspects of what may come next. Let’s not forget that Open Text already has a WCM-centric group called Open Text Web Solutions. Offering an even broader range of (quite similar) products is going to take some brain activity. Then again, this would not be the first quilting exercise for Open Text.

It's always good to get recognition from the analyst firms because many organizations pay attention to what these guys say. In the ever evolving area of records management, this recognition can help a lot.According to the report: The Forrester Wave(TM): Records Management, Q2 2009, a number of key enterprise content management vendors lead the wave for records management including Open Text, IBM, EMC and Oracle. Autonomy and CA are also leaders, with Interwoven and HP noted as strong performers.

The Open Text Web Solutions group, formerly known as RedDot Web Content Management (WCM), has just put out a new and significant release of their mid-range Web CMS product. Yes, Vignette (when the acquisition is finalized) will take place alongside Web Solutions version 10 in this WCM quilt. This update brings improvements to the technology stack, more Enterprise CMS and SAP integration patchwork and an updated user interface. But OTEX didn’t stop there. Let's see what else they've done. We spoke with Marci Maddox, Open Text’s director for global product marketing, to get the details.

It would be an understatement to say that social media is a hot topic nowadays, including in the enterprise. You may be terrified of using it in your organization, but you really have no choice. Social media is here to stay, and you may as well embrace it rather than fight it. Open Text watches this trend closely and acts accordingly, in its true “candy and aspirin” fashion. Today, the vendor has announced a new addition to the Enterprise CMS platform — Open Text Social Media, which may help conservative organizations to (safely) warm up to social media.

Open Text™ recently announced availability of the latest release of Open Text Web Solutions. Available to customers now, this new release offers a number of additional enhancements to what is already a core strength of Open Text Web Solutions: Helping customers translate, manage and synchronize multiple websites worldwide. Web Solutions is an integral component of the Open Text ECM Suite, the industry's most comprehensive suite of content services used by tens of thousands of organizations worldwide.

Recruiting at the enterprise level can be a chore. With large amounts of documents, innumerable departments and HR nightmares, it can be easy to get lost fast. For those enterprises who want better control Open Text has teamed with Microsoft to bring you a recruiting management solution for use with SharePoint Server 2007.

Open Text™, a global leader in enterprise content management (ECM), recently announced the latest versions of Open Text Desktop Viewer and Open Text Thin Client Viewer, with expanded support for new file formats. The solutions help enterprises lower costs and improve productivity by providing a simple way to manage the creation, capture, viewing, markup and publishing of content across departments and the enterprise. Using the Open Text Thin Client Viewer, customers can view, share, distribute and collaborate on documents online with partners, suppliers and customers via a Web browser.

Open Text has partnered with Recommind, a provider of enterprise search and eDiscovery solutions, to offer a new product called Open Text eDiscovery Early Case Assessment. The solution promises to minimize the need for third-party processing and help control the high costs of legal reviews by culling irrelevant information before it goes for review by outside counsel.

Nearing the end of its Content World 2008 Conference, Open Text announced new plans for its eDOCS product line that will give customers the flexibility to leverage the latest ECM technology. The plan includes new enhancements for eDOCS, more integrations with the Open Text ECM suite and more play time with Microsoft. eDOCS Overview Over the last year, Open Text has been working hard on several new solutions and integrations for records management product eDOCS, including the U.S. Department of Defense 5015.2-STD certification last October, integration of BPM capabilities and with Enterprise Connect, an Open Text Content Service which allows customers to provide customized views of business information to users in familiar applications.

Open Text kicked off its global Content World conference today in Orlando, Florida. The ECM giant expects it to be the largest conference in history with more than 1500 participants registered to attend. Pre- and post-conference workshops, breakouts, training, GlobalStar awards, partner schmoozing, showcasing its ECM solutions, Universal Studios trips… Open Text is going to be busy in the next few days. The event features a conference-within-a-conference program. Attendees tailor their conference experience: product/technology-specific tracks are available in the morning, with broader enterprise views offered in the afternoon.

Now that the acquisition of Captaris by Open Text is no longer an intention but a fact, what does the Enterprise CMS giant plan to do with this Washington-based provider of document management and delivery solutions? Captaris Acquisition is Final The merger was completed last week. Captaris is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Open Text Inc. Shares of Captaris’ common stock, which prior to the merger traded on NASDAQ under CAPA, are in the process of being delisted from trading.

Enterprise content management provider Open Text has announced a “first-of-its-kind” records management and archiving capability for Microsoft’s new cloud-based operating system Windows Azure. Azure is Microsoft’s new cloud-based operating system. Open Text will incorporate these cloud-based capabilities into its Enterprise Library Services offering early next year. As you may recall, last year, Open Text released its Enterprise Library Services as apart of their Open Text Content Services — a “next generation” attempt at streamlining workflow and managing compliance. Enterprise Library Services lets customers integrate and extend ECM technology across their organizations.

Open Text has announced today the release of “next generation” Web Solutions. The fancy name is, in essence, a new release of the company’s Web CMS child — RedDot. It’s a name change and a total rebranding makeover. With all the underlying RedDot WCM technology still in the backbone, it is now called Web Solutions. The focus of this new release is on intranets, extranets, Enterprise 2.0 solutions and Web 2.0 tools that come armed with greater security and control over social media initiatives.

The Open Text — SharePoint saga continues, as the Enterprise CMS vendor announces new Open Text Storage Services for SharePoint. This new service lets customers store Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 content in external storage devices, reducing wasted space by automatically detecting multiple instances of the same content.

To know what's really going on within a firm or the industry in which it operates you need to watch where the money is flowing. In September money flowed in some interesting directions within the ECM sector. At Open Text it flowed out, as Chairman and CEO John Shakelton dumped almost all of his shareholdings. In contrast at NewGen in India it flowed in through a confirmed investment from SAP's venture arm (who already invest in open source ECM player Alfresco, among others).

Open Text Corporation, a global leader in Enterprise Content Management (ECM), recently announced the release of Version 2.0 of its Open Text Employee Information Management (EIM) solution. Highlights of the new version include improved user navigation, tighter integration with the SAP ERP Human Capital Management (SAP ERP HCM) solution, as well as a new feature that allows guest users to temporarily access content in personnel folders, subject to security policies.

Open Text Corporation, an enterprise content management vendor, pledged its support for the new Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard. The standard’s development is led by three major Enterprise Content Management (ECM) providers — EMC, IBM and Microsoft. Recap on CMIS CMIS is a new, open standard that will offer new ways for content applications to “talk” to content repositories. With the new standard, developers can write applications that can work with multiple repositories from different vendors, allowing users to access and organize information stored in different repositories through a single application and interface.

Just yesterday, some major enterprise content management industry heavy weights — Microsoft, IBM, EMC, Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle and SAP, announced the first ever Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification draft enabling interoperability across content repositories. By creating a common API, companies can develop write-once, run-anywhere, content and social applications.

Open Text Corporation, a well-known ECM player, announced its intention to acquire Captaris, Inc., a provider of document management and delivery solutions. The price of this deal is approximately US$ 131 million. Captaris specializes in document automation, capture, recognition, routing, workflow and delivery. The company is known for its RightFax Connector for SharePoint — one of the many Sharepoint connectors available out there. Other products include Captaris Workflow and Captaris Alchemy.

Is SAP slowly moving into the ECM space? It's a question that has been asked so many times over the years that it has become something of a "chestnut," as we say in England. For if you are ever at a loss as to what to chat about with people in the ECM industry, SAP is a surefire conversation starter. SAP was (allegedly) going to buy Open Text on many occasions, but as of today still have not. They were (allegedly) shocked when Open Text bought iXos ( a firm that focused almost exclusively on providing content and archiving software for SAP), but did nothing about it. They were (allegedly) going to buy German vendor Saperion, but didn't. Once Oracle moved in to the ECM space with their acquisition of Stellent, fine ECM minds asserted that SAP would be forced to respond, but they didn't.