Chicago-based Open Text Corp., provider of enterprise content management software, released a new Web Solutions Suite that integrates, manages and optimizes Web content for enterprise intranets, extranets and Web sites. The Suite is available from Open Text’s Web Solutions Group, RedDot.
According to Open Text, Web 2.0 tools are moving into the enterprise, but deployments are often small scale. “There are several factors at work behind this limited embrace, including newness of the technology, the need to work with numerous different vendors and risk of exposing confidential corporate information appropriately,” said the company.
Security (83 per cent), apathy (50 per cent) and unproven technology (61 per cent) are the top three reasons Canadian companies resist social media tools, according to Stéphane Gagnon, Business Solutions Advisor, CRM, Avanade Canada. A recent Avanade survey found only 16 per cent of Canadian companies “have a fully implemented strategy for integrating social computing for employees.”
RedDot’s Web Solutions Suite aims to provide a foundation for strategic, large-scale deployments. “We’ve rolled a lot of 2.0-type components into our offering that helps an organization not see that as a separate initiative, but as one entire content strategy,” said Stefanie Lightman, director of marketing at RedDot. “In today’s world, you can have user-generated content but also your corporate content and now you have the power of being able to merge those two types of content together.”
The Suite’s integrated Web 2.0 tools provide more security and control over social media than what a set of point solutions would offer, said Open Text. “All of your content is still sitting in one repository. It’s searchable across all of those 2.0 components. You can search your blogs and your wikis and even just your corporate html content easily because it’s all one platform versus having all those systems be disparate,” Lightman explained.
The Suite will also monitor content posted to internal and external wikis and blogs for adherence to industry and company policies, sending automatic notifications to moderators and site managers. “We see one of our strengths as making that environment safe for organizations,” said Lightman. “There is a pre- and post-publishing compliance engine that enables you to make sure that the information that does get published out on your site has gone through some sort of safety measures.”
Organizations have content coming in from all different repositories and in different forms – documents, html content, blogs and wikis – said Lightman. “You have all this information, sources that you want to package up and deliver to an audience. With Web content management and the RedDot Web Solutions Suite offering, you are really able to layer experience on top of your content, determining who sees what content and when.”
“Blogs allow individual people to contribute to a project of much larger scope and typically they need to be monitored or moderated in some way,” said Igor Abramovitch, branch manager at Robert Half Technology.
“When it does make sense, the company does implement it, but I think right now on the business side the idea of blogs is a little bit new…I see a lot more companies using blogs internally, for maybe their collaboration tools or for their projects, but not necessarily externally communicating to their customers or their clients,” he said.
“We haven’t seen wikis as much,” Abramovitch continued. “Typically, they do require some development time so not a lot of companies do go into it. We definitely see a lot of SharePoint out there, so if you are looking at wikis as part of SharePoint, absolutely there are a lot of SharePoint developments.”
The Web Solutions Suite provides seamless access to information across a variety of existing applications and repositories, including SAP and Microsoft SharePoint, said Open Text.
Enterprises with multiple Web sites in a variety of countries can use the Suite to manage content and allow local sites the flexibility to target content to visitors in their regions, added Lightman.