Next Generation OpenText Content Suite is Here…You Won’t Look at ECM the Same Way Again

Re-thinking ECM Drives Personal and Process Productivity as well as Control It’s happened. Last month saw the release of major upgrades to the OpenText product line, including an…

Alison Clarke profile picture
Alison Clarke

May 10, 20166 minute read

Content Server

Re-thinking ECM Drives Personal and Process Productivity as well as Control

It’s happened. Last month saw the release of major upgrades to the OpenText product line, including an incredible new version of OpenText™ Content Suite. Together they represent the most ambitious, extensive launch in OpenText history. Nothing has even come close to this in my eight years with the company and I have to say, it’s a pretty exciting milestone!

Of course, I’m most excited about the powerful new edition of Content Suite. Its most important innovations — huge advances in functionality and usability — are inspired by a whole new way of thinking about ECM, its role in the enterprise, and the way knowledge workers interact with, and use information.

What’s led to this step change? Take a look around your own office and the answers become clear.

People
The demographic make-up of our co-workers is tilting toward the digital-native generation, a cohort that’s come of age with simple, instant access to the information they want, whenever and wherever they want it. And they expect to work the same way; they’re mobile, agile, and instantly responsive. As you’ve probably experienced, most organizations are poorly equipped to meet this new approach to sharing, collaborating, and innovating.

Processes
Used to be, phone calls, faxes, and eventually email provided 99% of the information flow you needed to do your job. Not any more. Digital information is flooding the enterprise in exploding volumes, from ever-diversifying sources. Data generated by everything from social media to the supply chain constitutes an organization’s most valuable asset, if they can use it properly. There’s a critical need to seamlessly integrate, aggregate, and correlate this information to extract full value from it, as well as the people and processes that create it.

Governance
Unfortunately, working with huge pools of data has a dark side. Digital information’s key strength — mobility— has led to regular data breach headlines. Countless employees put employers at risk every day by transferring intellectual property to unsanctioned, ungoverned apps for easy access. In a world of increasingly complex and far-reaching security, privacy, and compliance requirements, organizations struggle to maintain control over their information with outdated tools, inadequate oversight, and labor-intensive practices.

Content Suite 16 is purpose-built to help organizations solve all these problems. It’s not just a re-launch of our ECM platform, it’s a complete re-think of the purpose and function of ECM within enterprises as they transform to become fully digital.

By building on its traditional strengths as guardian, bond, and organizer of information with new usability and integration functionality, Content Suite shifts the focus of ECM toward creating an enterprise-wide information backbone that places people before technology. It can now bridge previously isolated silos and distribute information effortlessly to drive productivity and oversight in three inter-connected areas:

Personal Productivity
Users want to access, share, and collaborate on business content in the same seamless, simple ways they connect with each other in their private lives. Content Suite 16 creates this environment. With OpenText™ Tempo Box and OpenText™ Core, organizations can finally foster frictionless synch-and-share collaboration on both sides of the firewall in a fully governed ECM environment. Users work the way they want, on their own terms, anytime, anywhere, underpinned by an ECM safety net that manages everything from version control to auditing to application of meta-tags.

Content Suite 16 also introduces a new user interface, one that provides a cohesive personal experience tailored to each individual user. Everything related to a subject can be personalized and presented in a simple format based on the user’s role and device. As an example, here’s an insurance industry use case: Through one easy-to-master interface, users can see everything they need to in relation to a claim — account information, completed claim form, feeds from the adjustor in the field, in-line communication from across the company, task lists, and more. All compiled, connected, and shared through Content Suite.


Process Productivity

In the digital era, we’ve digitized enterprise processes but not done a very good job of connecting them to each other. The information they produce is usually stored in a siloed repository aligned to the process. It’s usually hard to access, difficult to govern, and almost impossible for the business to use effectively. The Extended ECM capabilities of Content Suite eliminate this. They integrate ECM into the lead applications that produce this data (SAP®, Oracle®, Microsoft® and others), connecting silos to aggregate related information and present the full picture of any instance. With ECM fully embedded in the process, governance policies and classification tags can now be automatically applied right at the source.

Users are spared from doing the dirty work, yet benefit from the results. Imagine a use case where a user with a decision to make doesn’t even leave the application they’re working in to access the contract, inventory reports, sales figures, and email communication related to a supplier. Think of the increased efficiency, insight, and throughput. It’s all possible now.


Control

Having all this newly accessible information available to be usedin innovative, far-reaching ways actually creates more risk and inefficiency if proper governance and control isn’t consistently applied at all points. Analysts have always considered information governance to be one of Content Suite’s competitive strengths and Content Suite 16 improves on that.

The key is in the ability to integrate governance best practices into both personal and process information flows without impeding productivity.

Personal Productivity content — the high-volume, wildly unpredictable result of day-to-day collaboration and creation — is notorious for being high-risk while resisting oversight. Content Suite 16 introduces new capabilities to transparently capture content as it’s created in applications like file synch and share, email, and SharePoint® and automatically apply retention and security policies based on machine learning.

Process Productivity data — critical to continuity and records management — can now be automatically classified, tagged, and aggregated behind the scenes as soon as it’s generated. It’s inducted into the enterprise information lifecycle for effortless discovery and use by records managers, legal teams, and LOB leaders.

OpenText Content Suite is the Future of ECM
Content Suite redefines the role of ECM in the digital enterprise. It creates a seamless cross-enterprise information grid that provides the Personal and Process Productivity gains enterprises need within a framework of Control. Available on premise, as a subscription in the OpenText™ Cloud, or as a managed service, today it stands as the only comprehensive, fully integrated ECM suite in the industry.

Take a few minutes to find out more about what we have in store for you in Content Suite 16. Start by erasing your preconceived notions and perceptions of ECM. Then, visualize what transforming to become “digital inside” means to your organization. Chances are, OpenText Content Suite’s innovative new approach to implementing, extending, and using ECM can get you where you want to be.

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Alison Clarke

Alison is Director, Product Marketing for OpenText Content Suite and Extended ECM. Alison and her team are passionate about helping organizations use content services technologies to distill more value from information, supporting the needs of individuals and teams to improve productivity and strengthen information governance for the organization with content services-enabled solutions.

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