Open Text has outlined its plans for Livelink at a user conference.
One of the more interesting Livelink developments announced is the addition of an Outlook interface for Livelink. Enterprise content management (ECM) vendors are increasingly coming to realize that many end-users do not like having to use new applications. In fact, some Livelink customers have even written their own simple interfaces to disguise the fact that their users were working within an ECM system. The Outlook interface will provide a level of comfort for such users.
It is certainly not unique functionality to Open Text, and many of the leading ECM vendors already have this functionality, but Open Text is going a stage further by adding interfaces for other applications, such as SAP, to enable users to utilize the full functionality of Livelink from within the applications they are most familiar with, and spend most of their time within. The real value of this is that it makes it much easier to combine unstructured information with structured data to run content-centric processes and transactional-based processes from within an ECM system, particularly where records management (RM) is a requirement. The majority of Livelink customers use Microsoft platforms.
At the conference, an Open Text RM solution for Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 that enables customers to apply compliance-driven RM retention and disposition policies to content maintained in Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 was also announced. Livelink will also provide full support for Office 12 when it is released, enabling organizations to extend the functionality offered by Office 12 into business processes.
The Open Text roadmap puts the company back on track, although many of the features announced are also provided by other ECM vendors. However, the integration with SAP goes much further than other vendors. This is important as Open Text must not sit back on its laurels but continue to innovate if it is to remain a major force in the ECM market.
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
