Open Text 2010 Sets Up Defensive Services

Open Text’s marketing of their new 2010 ECM suite and share services points to four distinct areas of focus: Lifecycle, Process/Transaction, Engagement, and Shared Services. Looking at these stacks, it is clear that OT’s has set up them up to deal SharePoint’s strengths and weaknesses. The Library services layer would have been revolutionary 10 years ago, now it’s just another ECM suite trying to be the archive and retention layer in an enterprise.

Also the initial release of ECM 2010 is for Windows 2008 R2 64bit until the 32bit is available. If this isn’t a concession to Microsoft, I’m not sure what is. Oracle gets a boost too with the 11g requirement.

“Management content and metadata in a consistent manner” is such a cliche at this point.

Lifecycle (“strong” hold): these are all set to be broken out as services.

• Document Management – lots of potential here, but each of these need to be services…
• Records Management – classification layer on top of document classes. One of the biggest potential services that could be developed, but currently is very embedded in the core CS product.
• Rights Management – a service which is used to encrypt/decrypt content.
• Digital Asset Management – “I want you tube”
• Archiving – this needed to be highlighted a long time ago. Flexible storage allocation was huge before EMC bought Documentum. Now everyone is following their lead.

Process/Transaction (decoupled service from content server for enterprise implementation)

• Business Process Management – separated from the core content server, this service is offered as a single instance which will integrate with many other repository services, including the content server.
• Capture and Imaging – This is separated out as well with connectors to repositories.

Engagement (up for grabs, here you go SharePoint, please don’t take anything more…)

• Collaboration: is this a joke?
• Social Media: right?
• Web Content Management: hmm, I don’t think so.
• Rich Media Management: If I have too.
• Mobility: get in line.

Shared Services

• Library Services (too little, too late)
  ECM suite, SAP, SharePoint, File system, Email system
• Enterprise Process Services – BPM above
  
  

So what would be a better alignment of services to appeal to experienced and frustrated folks? How about tossing out the authoring and collaborating side until Microsoft succumbs to Open Source formats and focusing on tagging, classifying, and storing information. In other words, focus on where the current pain points are which are not at the document level anymore, they are at the information architecture level and SOA projects are all custom after the designing part is done. Hmm, maybe Open Text can open itself up to services that really help information get organized instead of trying to compete with Microsoft in collaboration or publishing to website…