What's the first thing you do when you wake up? Right, check your mobile phone (Don't even try to deny that). And now, Open Text (news, site) is bringing Enterprise CMS to a phone near you, so you cannot escape work, but can jump right into your ECM activities after checking Twitter.
Organizations would be happy to know there's yet another way to increase workforce productivity thanks to Open Text Everywhere.
Open Text Wants to Be Everywhere
As Eugene Roman, CTO of Open Text, told us (no, we didn’t get to talking about VQA wines and his Rosewood Estates winery in the Niagara region), Open Text Everywhere is a new native mobile application from Open Text designed to make the entire Open Text ECM Suite available on mobile devices. It is scheduled to be released in early May 2010.
The first step in this Open Text endeavor is to support limited ECM functionality on BlackBerry smartphones with more ECM applications and supported devices to come in the future.
Smartphones are smart enough nowadays that they can take the role of laptops and desktops and extend its use beyond the usual email, calendaring, messaging, microblogging and checking the news.
Open Text counts in that fact and wants to offer document browsing, search and workflow managing capabilities to its mobile users. The plan is three-fold right now:
1. Manage Everywhere
Although pretty basic, there are some document and content management capabilities in this release of Open Text Everywhere: ability to browse folders, search, view, manage and email documents stored in the Open Text ECM Suite. Things like content publishing should be coming later.
2. Engage Everywhere
This is where process workflows come in, so that you can approve workflow items literally in your sleep.
Open Text plans to offer the ability to initiate workflows, attach and view documents related to a business process, approve or reject workflows – all on a mobile device.
3. Collaborate Everywhere
Also in this early stage of Open Text Everywhere release, you will see some collaboration and social media features in Open Text Social Media, which will include participating in communities, viewing and adding to social community wikis and blogs, connecting with users and getting important information from member profiles. With time, these basic capabilities will be extended across all media offerings.
Open Text Everywhere uses the BlackBerry platform’s secure connection transportation layer for fully encrypted wireless communication, allowing for the same organizational permissions model to be used for mobile users.
Other mobile devices – most likely iPhone (there’s an app there already) and other major players like Android and Windows Mobile – should be supported later on.
Future Plans for Mobile Strategy
Later in 2010, Open Text plans to expand its mobile ECM applications and add the following:
- Mobile applications for Vendor Invoice Management and other transactional content management solutions integrated with SAP
- Mobile applications for eDOCS document management solution
- Mobile social media applications based on Vignette Community Services and Vignette Community Applications
In early 2011, Open Text plans to focus on the following:
- A mobile email management application for legal, regulatory or corporate governance rules customers
- Web content management for Vignette or RedDot CMS is not in the plans yet, but is being analyzed and challenges are being weighed for possible implementation in 2011 and beyond.
As Roman has mentioned, “Business doesn’t stop when we leave the desktop or the laptop. It’s time to unleash business content, processes and applications to go wherever employees need them on a smartphone.”
While the pricing for ECM functionality for your mobile phones hasn’t been disclosed at the time of the interview, we were told current and future Open Text customers will find it reasonable.
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