Open Text News & Articles

Quite an eventful week in the content management industry! Here are our highlights of the week and most popular stories, jobs, featured events and -- new in this column -- polls and your votes.

Top Stories of the Week

• Open Text Reports Good Q2, Vignette Contributes to YoY Spike. OTEX did better than in the past quarters, in part, thanks to Vignette and (formerly known as) RedDot contributing to the bottom line.
• SharePoint 2010 - 5 Hot Features to Look Forward To. With the release of SharePoint 2010 getting closer, people are getting either a) excited, b) nervous or c) all of the above. Have a look at the top 5 noteworthy changes coming with SharePoint 2010.
• Alterian Drops Immediacy, Morello Web CMS Brands. In this exclusive, we discussed Alterian's plans and WCM strategy. In short, it boils down to major consolidation efforts in the mish-mash of Web CMS technologies the company currently offers. Customers, get ready for changes.
• Webtrends Adds Advanced Targeting and Mobile Analytics. The Web analytics solution provider released both advanced targeting capabilities and Webtrends Mobile Analytics. Heads up marketers, this one’s for you.
• Selecting a CMS: How to Build a Short List. In this guest post, Seth Gottlieb drills down into the science of building a short list -- one of the important steps in any Web CMS selection process. Don't let the high stakes paralyze you.
• Day CQ 5.3 Aims to Brighten the Days of Techies and Marketers Alike. Day’s latest minor release includes more than 600 enhancements over CQ 5.2.0 code base. Changes start right from the welcome screen.
• Social Media Minute: Social to Rule the Enterprise, Unless Spam and Malware Win Out. Gartner offered five social software predictions for the near future. Social networking will spread into the enterprise, they say, and will replace e-mail as a primary communication platform for 20 percent of business users.

Most Popular Articles

These articles were what you fancied most this week, according to Unlce Google's analytics data.

• Gartner’s Top 5 BPM Predictions for 2010 And Beyond. Gartner released latest report on business process management highlighting what they see as the five major trends in business process management for 2010 and beyond.
• Web Design: Top 5 Wireframing Tools. As more wireframe tools become available, the focus is shifting to include IA. Here is a selection of wireframes that are sure to prove useful.

• 10 Best Practices for Website Landing Pages. These top ten best practices for landing pages encourage companies to make smart marketing choices, which will not only engage the user but be able to show higher ROI.

• Alert: What's Coming for Open Source CMS in February 2010. Updates from the majority of open source CMS players: from Acquia to XOOPS.

• 6 Ways Document Management and Records Management Differ. The question is, will your document management system also support records management? At the core of this question is what is the differences between document management and records management. Let's examine six differences.

• Google Drops Bomb on MS Internet Explorer 6. If you swear allegiance to both Internet Explorer and Google Apps, as of March 1st you may find yourself in an uncomfortable predicament, and frankly speaking, we're rather happy about all this.

• SharePoint 2010, A Business Collaboration Platform. 100 million licenses and 4,000 partners later, Microsoft thinks they have a handle on this SharePoint phenomenon.

Polls and Your Votes

• What's Your Biggest Digital Asset Management Challenge? Is it taxonomy management, usability or selecting a product? So far, it looks like the biggest struggle is the usability of the system at 23% with 98 votes. Vote and let us know what your challenges with DAM are.
• What's Your Web CMS Focus in 2010? Cloud hosted or SaaS, search integration or integration of social media? As of today, the majority of readers (25% with 18 votes) say their focus lies in the cloud and SaaS area. Do you agree? Cast your vote and see what others think.

Content Management Jobs

Here's what's been brewing lately in the CMS jobs and careers field. For both seekers and employers, catch the best fish of the season on our content management job board.

Featured Jobs:

• Software Engineer at NewsGator
• Social Media Business Assistant at Mashable
• Technical Writer at ZL Technologies
• Project Manager at TERMINALFOUR
• Territory Sales Manager at Kentico Software, LLC
• Sales Representative at Nuxeo
• Web Developer at ADAM Software

Traveling or Virtual, There are CMS Events to Attend

Wondering how to spend your time in the next few weeks or months? Attend a conference or maybe just a webinar or two. Have a look at our Industry Events Calendar to see what's happening in your area.

Featured Events:

• February 9-10 (Santa Clara): SDL Innovate 2010
• February 9-12 (Phoenix): ECM Master Class
• February 10-12 (San Francisco): SharePoint Technology Conference 2010
• February 17 (Online): Webinar: 4 Essential Strategies for Advancing Your Website's Business Impact
• February 17-18 (Universal City): Createasphere DAM 2010

Open Text (news, site) released Q2/F10 (December 2009 quarter) unaudited financial results. Turns out, they are better than expected. Year-over-year (YoY) licensing revenue, for example, is up, in part, thanks to Vignette and the recently released VCM 8.

Many people may have spent their time wondering what will happen with Vignette now that Open Text acquired the company, but EntropySoft (news, site) doesn't seem to be one of them. Instead, they have spent their time working on an enterprise connector, making interoperability with Vignette that much easier.

It’s been 7 years since the last major release of Vignette Content Management (7.0). If you wondered about the fate of the promised last year VCM V8 in the light of Vignette’s (news, site) various tribulations and the Open Text acquisition, worry not. It is officially here.

Open Text (news, site) released version 4.0 of Open Text Capture Center that offers improved data capture, document classification and better integration with the Open Text ECM Suite.

This product is based on Captaris DOKuStar Capture Suite that came to the OT family through the Captaris acquisition in late 2008.

You can't afford to ignore the issue of Digital Asset Management, or DAM. It's more than a fun acronym. Solid DAM can make your business more efficient. Poor DAM can result in waste, confusion and many lost opportunities.

Last month, in Part 1 of an examination of case management we looked at how Enterprise CMS vendors have been preoccupied with the development of platforms and solutions designed to fill a growing demand for case management software.

Here in the second part of this series we look at  specific software products that companies can use to develop case management frameworks.

Content is everywhere, and it is not cheap to manage it. Open Text (news, site) says it wants to lower the costs by connecting transactional data with business content behind each transaction through one app.

The new Open Text Content Access for Oracle application provides a single point of access to data for Oracle E-Business Suite users. Oracle E-Business Suite is a set of enterprise applications dealing mainly with ERP, lifecycle management and CRM.

The content access app works with both Oracle and non-Oracle content and allows users to link structured data in Oracle transactions with business content (electronic and paper assets, such as e-mail and contracts) managed in Open Text Enterprise CMS suite of products, while also covering the GRC angle.

Usually, content needs to be re-used across multiple applications, even though some of it is tied to a specific one (ERP, CRM, etc.). This is when Open Text’s new app gives a way of sharing business content across different applications, while managing access, retention, audit history, compliance, risk and other document and records management related activities.

As a side note: Oracle and Open Text’s relationship goes as far back as 10 years, and OTEX says it plans to continue its ECM technologies development using Oracle Fusion middleware.

Canadian ECM specialist Open Text (news, site) adds support for Microsoft's latest operating system to its connectivity system as the OS reaches 5% market share.

Only six weeks after Open Text (news,  site) and SAP (news, site) extended their partnership to include a reseller agreement for the SAP Extended ECM application by Open Text, the two have decided to beef up retention management, compliance and CRM elements.

In recent months many ECM vendors have been preoccupied with the development of platforms and solutions designed to fill a growing demand for case management software.

But what exactly is Case Management and how do Enterprise Content Management Systems support this growing market?

Editor's Note: Part 2 of this series is now available. See: ECMs that Implement Case Management Frameworks.

We always look to the analysts to help us narrow down our selection of vendors for things like enterprise content management. We recently had a look at Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management. Now we look to Forrester (news, site), who has released their Q4 Wave for Enterprise Content Management Suites.

Earlier this week Mimosa Systems (news, site) announced its NearPoint archiving solution would support Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 (MES 2010). Now Open Text (news, site)  has upgraded its enterprise content management suite’s fax functionality so that it too works with MES 2010.

While there will be a lot of stick-in-the-mud document management software vendors who would argue that enterprises shouldn’t be using fax in the first place, the reality is that for most companies fax and faxing is still an important business tool.

In fact many companies who have invested considerable money in network-based fax capabilities could see their investments heading south with the launch of MES 2010 if the two cannot be integrated.

Due to a highly volatile marketplace, Gartner (news, site) specifically advises that you avoid comparing vendor placement in prior years, but it's still exciting to see who made the cut in the Enterprise CMS Magic Quadrant this time around.

Leaders include Oracle, IBM, Open Text and Microsoft, while players like Autonomy, Xerox and Hyland Software sit in the other three brackets. Observe:

Open Text Content World is coming to a close today. Like most user conferences and industry events, I find everyone gets the highest value from connecting with other people.

Everyone loves the networking, sharing stories and best practices, bouncing ideas, building friendships and having fun. The breakout sessions and PowerPoint decks are almost secondary.

I would like to share some of my observations from this week resulting from talking to partners, colleagues, customers and friends. These are the topics and trends I identified.