Micro Focus Content Manager, as the former TRIM records management product will shortly be known, does not represent the entire future of information management, but will act as the hub of future content services delivered by the ‘spun-merged’ HP Enterprise Software division, according to a roadmap laid out at the 2017 Information Governance Forum.

Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) agreed last year to sell its software business to the UK’s Micro Focus in a $US8.8 billion deal that shrinks the Silicon Valley pioneer again while catapulting the little-known British firm into the top tier of European tech companies.

Jaimie Tilbrook, WW Product Manager, HPE Content Manager at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, said the company is embracing and encouraging content services that would include connectors to link Content Manager to a broad range of external repositories and publishing platforms.

In many cases these will be competing platforms to HPE-developed solutions, but the company was committed to allowing CM users to adopt other best of breed solutions in content management and collaboration.

Tilbrook pointed to the Objective Connect secure collaboration platform as an example.

“A large number of our customers are using Objective Connect now. We have HPE Connected MX (a solution launched in 2015 that brings together policy-based endpoint backup with rule-based file synchronisation and sharing capabilities) but we won’t shove it down your throat. The same with HPE Web publishing, we have a technology but you [as a CM customer] can use anything.”

Tilbrook referenced social media protection and compliance solution Social Safeguard as another example of a connected service extending Content Manager’s capabilities. HPE is currently reselling Social Safeguard as a cloud-based or on-premise solution that provides security, compliance and data archival for an organisation’s official accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Google+.

Content is presently archived on Social Safeguard’s own database repository, however HPE plans to offer the ability to ingest into Content Manager by the end of 2017.

“Content services are critical to our vision,” said Tilbrook.

Business Process Management was also flagged as an area of focus for the near future.

“Putting a post-it note on a printout does not scale well for the enterprise.

“You will likely see something coming from HPE [Micro Focus] but in the meantime it will be via existing BPM platforms through content services via connectors”.

Another area that HPE is putting a “lot of effort into at the moment” is Enterprise Search as well as Content Analytics

“We are actively looking for customers to help shape this,” said Tilbrook.