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Services Oriented Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

Open Text Corp one of Enterprise Content Management's (ECM) heavyweight vendors has announced the Livelink ECM Platform (note the word "platform").

The the new offering is described as a secure, integrated framework that combines a shared content repository with user, content, and process services in a service-oriented architecture (SOA).

As ECM365 recently editor James Brown recently noted, Open Text is all about "bigness". The platform, touts a shared repository and shared services. It provides the full range of ECM services: Collaboration, Documents, Web Content, E-mail Management, and ERP.

Bigness it may be. The vision is one of SOA as the lion tamer.

According to Open Text, the announcement of the Livelink ECM Platform marks the completion of Open Text's integration of Livelink with the content archive from IXOS Software, acquired by Open Text last year.

This integration within the service-oriented architecture announced last fall, allows Open Text to offer a shared platform for multiple solutions, universal access to enterprise content, a common user experience, and simplified maintenance and administration.

"With a shared repository and services, customers can start with one departmental ECM solution today, add another tomorrow, and ultimately deploy a comprehensive ECM strategy company-wide when the time is right, all the while leveraging and building upon the company's initial investment," says Hartmut Schaper, Senior Vice President of Research and Development at Open Text.

Open Text's services-oriented architecture provides a layer of software "services" that link applications to repositories of information, providing flexible integration with existing repositories.

The services architecture is being built entirely in Java and includes native support for SOAP-based web services. The services include: Collaboration services to support person-to-person interaction; content services to provide a single point of access to all content; business process services to automate processes around content; and a user directory service for a single point of user management and single sign-on for applications.

Open Text supports almost 20 million software seats across 13,000 deployments in 114 countries and 12 languages.