Open Text adds social updates to ECM suite

Open Text Social Communities offers in-depth analytics and advanced social search

Open Text has updated its enterprise content management (ECM) capabilities with new social media capabilities.

The features were already offered in Open Text's periphery products, but have now been integrated with the core ECM Suite and given minor enhancements.

The company could not say how much the updated version of the ECM suite will cost, nor whether customers will benefit financially from buying the social capabilities as part of the core ECM suite, or separately as add-ons.

The Vignette Community Applications, which Open Text acquired when it bought WCM vendor Vignette last year, have been integrated into the main suite and renamed Open Text Social Communities.

Social Communities allows companies to add Web 2.0 features to their sites, such as video and photo galleries, slideshows, comments, ratings, forums, blogs and wikis. Open Text said that the application has also been updated to offer in-depth analytics and advanced social search.

The Open Text Social Workplace product has been integrated with the full ECM suite, and updated to include micro-blogging and instant messaging. Social Workplace was released last year, and allows employees to collaborate on documents and discuss information in community spaces.

The Open Text ECM Suite Content Server, which provides full lifecycle management for any type of electronic document, has been enhanced with Pulse, which allows users to look into the activity occurring inside the system, collaborate on new content and share status updates.

Open Text ECM allows businesses to manage different types of content and integrate it with business systems from Microsoft, Oracle and SAP.

The company added social capabilities to the suite in 2008 so that customers could apply regulatory and legal rules to the content.