Open Text, which this week launched the latest version of its content management suite, ECM Suite 2010, believes it won’t be long before the mobile device replaces the trusty desktop PC as the primary device for most users. That belief is also changing the way it thinks about the future of content management, CBR has learned.
"We envision a world where the mobile device will replace the PC as the primary device," Lubor Ptacek, VP of product marketing at the firm told CBR in an interview. "It will be the first place that people do email and look up information. Given that, we expect mobility to be an increasingly heavy play for us."
The company already has a content management solution for mobile devices called Open Text Everywhere. This is said to enable staff to browse, search, view, manage, and email documents and other forms of content stored in the Open Text ECM Suite from a mobile device.
But Ptacek said that the likes of social media is changing the way that staff engage with corporate communications as well as customers, partners and suppliers: "Often they have to be forced to use enterprise applications, but social media they actually like using," he noted.
Open Text is doing more work to enable social media to be brought within the Open Text content management universe, as well as working on for example ensuring that large documents can be viewed conveniently on mobile devices with their reduced screen sizes and bandwidth capabilities; optimising content viewing and workflows to minimise battery drain and doing more to bring web content management into the mobile arena.
"We’re looking much more at that area [web content management in the mobile realm]," Ptacek said. "We want web based applications optimised for mobile devices too, especially when driven by our web content management. We’re not there yet, we still need a bit more ‘build it yourself’ than we should, and we want to make mobile web content management as much of an out-of-the-box experience as possible."
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As for social media, Ptacek said there are two main design goals that Open Text has in mind: it wants to be able to bring social media content into websites that have been built with Open Text technology; and it wants to enable social media to be brought into applications built in the enterprise: content management, records management, case management and so on.
Ptacek said the firm wants to be able to help companies to bring social media into their enterprise without sacrificing security, ‘auditability’ or compliance.
Meanwhile Ptacek said that while the company has a number of offerings that can be hosted by Amazon, Microsoft or Open Text itself, it’s not been especially good at publicising its cloud credentials. "Right now we’re watching customer demand," he said. "It still feels pretty sporadic. A lot of our customers are heavily regulated and don’t like the idea of putting some or all of their content in the cloud. I’d say we see partial interest. But we have quite a few products that are already cloud enabled."
CBR expects to see more interest in ‘cloud content management’ in the next 12 months, with companies like Box.net and CIMtrek either offering that, or services that help firms migrate content and collaboration processes to the cloud.
Lubor Ptacek, Open Text.
