The Toronto-based company announced a new strategic relationship that will drive more implementations of its flagship Hummingbird Enterprise suite on Microsoft’s familiar desktop products and infrastructural technology stack — notably Office, Outlook, SharePoint Portal Server, SQL Server 2005.
Hummingbird has already developed a special Enterprise Client that hooks to Outlook, allowing users to access and manage business content from within Microsoft Office XP and Outlook 2003 environments.
Hummingbird also promised early support for the next version of Microsoft’s Office products – codenamed Office 12. It also pledged its commitment to Microsoft’s .NET strategy to encourage deeper integration and application development between the Microsoft desktop and the Hummingbird Enterprise repository, including the ability to natively support linked documents such as Office Excel spreadsheets.
According to Hummingbird CEO Barry Litwin, part of the reason for tapping Microsoft’s infrastructure is to decrease total cost of ownership and reduce the complexities traditionally associated with implementing content management technologies.
In addition to developing solutions on the Office platform, Hummingbird has embraced Microsoft .NET which enables us to deliver integrated [content management] applications more quickly and cost effectively, he said.
Hummingbird says it will work closely with Microsoft in the field to promote integrated content management solutions.
The announcement was made at Hummingbird’s user summit this week in Miami, Florida.
