Open Text Works To Deliver On Enterprise 2.0 Promises

Open Text last week announced a number of interesting enhancements to round out its portfolio of Enterprise 2.0 solutions. It's a buzzword-heavy mix, as it embraces social networking, personalization, and Web 2.0 collaboration. But the most interesting features may appeal most to legal and regulatory departments.Of course, the announcement gives much of the attention to the social networking and Web 2.0 features, since they're the most eye-catching and sound great in a pitch. There's added and improved support for content tags, personalization with customized content based on interest and function, and support for real-time collaboration. It's all neat, useful stuff, and should be part of the mix for any full-service ECM solution.

But probably most compelling -- at least from a legal and regulatory perspective -- are the enhancements in Open Text's Compliance and Validation Services. These services allow the teams responsible for ensuring legal or regulatory compliance to apply rules to content across the enterprise, prior to allowing the material to be published.

It's powerful stuff, ranging from basic validation confirming that Web pages meet ADA 508 and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines standards, to support for applying more complex, customized rules. These rules can run against virtually any user-generated content -- blogs, wikis, knowledge bases -- and can act as a sort of safety net for both internal and external-facing content.

Open Text offers these new capabilities for Livelink ECM, its own full-featured enterprise content management system, as well as for Microsoft SharePoint and SAP. With support for these platforms, the company hopes to add value (and presumably revenue) by allowing Open Text's new features to be layered onto a customer's existing ECM solution.

Overall, it's a good batch of new features and certainly worth a look for anyone using or considering Open Text's products.