OpenText Adds Customized Messaging To ECM Suite

OpenText has brought its Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and social media skills to high-volume consumer applications with the release of StreamServe Persuasion Version 5. OpenText acquired StreamServe last October.

Lubor Ptacek, the company's vice president for product marketing, said this lets companies do mass customization of marketing messages and support responses to those messages from call centers in a highly personalized way. "Streamserve is the off-ramp of content management," he said, a platform supporting large numbers of interactions among many people simultaneously.

With Persuasion Version 5, OpenText has brought its ECM skills to the call center party, allowing operators in customer response centers or logistics and distribution to respond in a personalized way, with all the information they need in front of them, and without adding paper to the workflow.

Mass customization is becoming vital in marketing, in customer support, and in distribution applications. The combination of StreamServe and OpenText supports this, giving ready access to relevant information as soon as someone calls.

The announcement highlights OpenText's view that social interactions should be handled in the ECM space, rather than through in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software that is only used by one department.

"You get the most benefit out of social media the more users can use it," Ptacek said. "CRM is usually restricted to a small number of users."

OpenText allows large numbers of employees to collaborate together on complex sets of documents inside the firewall, with channel partners where documents cross the firewall, or (through StreamServe) directly with consumers, in interactions that mainly exist outside the firewall, no matter how high the transaction volume.

The combination delivers both scalability and what Ptacek called a "Switzerland" approach to content formats. "We work with Microsoft, Oracle, SAP -- that makes us different."

All this goes mobile with OpenText Everywhere, the company's offering for mobile devices. "The business process today usually stops if you travel, but if you have content management everywhere you can approve a request directly from the mobile device" after examining it.

That process should work regardless of the documents being examined. "Say you have a 10 megabyte PowerPoint -- you can't download that to a Blackberry. We convert it on the server to small images that fit the screen size and push those. It's optimized for bandwidth and battery life."

Full specifications on StreamServe Persuasion 5 are on the OpenText Web site.