OpenText Expands More Companies Offer Salesforce Integration

It’s been a busy few weeks in the document management space. OpenText announced it will be doubling its workforce in Canada in the next seven years and Perceptive released Content 7.

For those using Salesforce.com, SpringCM and Steelbrick have teamed up to provide sales lifecycle management, while Oris4 is connecting SharePoint and Salesforce.com. We also took a look at managing metadata in SharePoint.

OpenText To Double Workforce

OpenText has really been pushing the boat out recently, particularly with the development of technologies around the five pillars of information management strategy it outlined two years ago and its more recent Project Red Oxygen.

To keep up with this pace and its quickening level of activity, it plans to double its Canadian workforce by creating 1,200 jobs over the next seven years — an investment it estimates will pump $2 billion into the local economy. As a mark of appreciation, the province of Ontario will provide OpenText up to $120 million in support for the initiative.

At least 30 percent of the new jobs will be research and development (R&D), 10 percent of those jobs will be for people under the age of 29 and a lot of the jobs will center around cloud computing.

In addition to expanding OpenText’s footprint at its corporate headquarters in Waterloo and its Ottawa offices, the company also unveiled the future site of its worldwide customer briefing center and offices, which will be in the heart of downtown Toronto.

OpenText has been investing heavily in Canada in recent times and in the past six months alone has launched a number of initiatives that aim to seed technology companies there, including a new $217 million venture capital fund that was set up in February. 

Perceptive Launches Content 7

Perceptive Software has also been busy this month with the launch of Perceptive Content 7. According to Perceptive, Content 7 comes with new mobile and web clients, advanced administration, rich media management, as well as Perceptive records manager. The focus is on developing an overall better customer experience.

In practical terms and for users, this means offering the full range of Perceptive functionality, which includes document capture, content submission, workflow initiation and approvals as well as search, all from mobile devices.

Scott Coons, president and CEO of Perceptive said Perceptive Content 7 has more than 80 new features. Among the noteworthy additions is an offering that allows users to capture images, enter metadata and import them into Perceptive Content from their mobile device. In addition,  the new web client provides full support for HTML 5 and eliminates the need for Java.

Perceptive managed to make its way into the Leaders Quadrant of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for ECM last September and has been building itself up through the acquisition of technology with financial support of its parent company Lexmark.

SpringCM Partners With SteelBrick

Meanwhile, SpringCM, and SteelBrick, a Configure Price Quote (CPQ) apps vendor for Salesforce.com customers, announced the release of an integrated application that combines CPQ with document and contract management capabilities.

The new app helps Salesforce.com customers manage the entire lifecycle of a sale form the opening and first contact with a prospect to the signing and closure of a deal. It offers CPQ and contracts lifecycle management by streamlining the steps that happen before the quote is generated and after the contract is signed.

Powered by SpringCM’s content management and workflow automation and SteelBrick’s platform for generating customer-friendly quotes easily and accurately, the new app optimizing sales activities that happen before and after the contract is signed, including archiving, audits, searches, add-ons and renewal processes.

If you’re a growing business, change is constant — and you’re dealing with it in the form of new products, shifting market windows, expanded sales teams, and increasing competition,” said Ben Kiker, CMO, SpringCM.

The new app, he added, won’t stop businesses from changing, but will help eliminate the errors and frustrations that come with those changes.

Oris4 Links SharePoint and Salesforce.com

Oris4 has also been busy with Salesforce.com recently by providing a way for business users to feed their SharePoint content into Salesforce.com applications using Oris4's cross-cloud search and data aggregation capabilities.

Imagine the ability to view an account in Salesforce.com and see all the relevant files and emails pertaining to that company that you have access to, regardless of what system they reside on. That's what Oris4 can do and our new SharePoint integration takes this to a whole new level." said Reza Kazemipour, CEO of Oris4.

Oris4's contextual indexing delivers the document, file or email you need to do your job when you need it. Each file is linked to the people or companies you are working with and available to you from any device.

Managing SharePoint Metadata

If you missed it earlier this week, we took a look at six ways businesses can deal with metadata in SharePoint and how proper metadata management can help them. The possibilities range from developing information governance strategies to implementing text analytics and improving the native search functions of the SharePoint edition they work with.

The projects were identified in recent research by semantic search vendor Concept Searching (CS), which called them key objectives for companies that want to get the best out of their SharePoint deployments.