Web 2.0 blooms at Open Text

June 26, 2009:Open Text is ready to unleash Project Bloom upon the ECM world, taking a Web 2.0 platform it has been running in beta behind its own firewall for the past 12 months into public release.

Known as Open Text Social Media, the new offering ties together tools for enterprise control of collaboration, blogs, wikis and instant messaging.

It promises to marry social media technology to an enterprise-ready content management infrastructure with native mobile applications for Apple iPhone and RIMBlackBerry devices initially, and additional device support planned.

The solution is being marketed to existing Livelink users, although it can be deployed without Livelink as a pure social media platform. It is also being offered as a hosted solution in the US and Europe, with the company presently looking into the possibility of extending this to the Asia-Pacific region.

Cuneyt Uysal, Product Manager – Web Solutions Group, Open Text Australia, said, "For the past decade ECM solutions have been about content, whereas with this product we are placing people and communities first and putting content around that."

"The main Dashboard gives you a constant feed of updates to the people or communities you choose to follow, whether its their blogs orwikis and you can collaborate or comment on any of these items.

"And because our social media tools are integrated with our enterprise services for document management, they are stored within LiveLink with scalability and security from a records standpoint. Other vendors of social media tools can't supply the same backend for compliance and discovery."

"Within our own company, I can do a search on a particular subject and find out quickly which one of the 4000 staff in Open Text is blogging on that topic, so I can easily find an expert and I don't have to go through employee directory or ask my boss. Getting the right information at the right time is extremely valuable in a large organisation."

Due to become available this July, Open Text Social Media is based on technology acquired in 2002 from a company called First Class.