RIP Open Text Social Media. Viva Open Text Social Workplace. Total bloom bada boom. Confused? Oh, don't be. It's all simple, really.

Open Text (news, site) rebranded its social media product (Open Text Social Media -> Open Text Social Workplace), as well as released a new version of it, looping in some Vignette functionalities and targeting the enterprise urge to use social media, but in a secure and controlled fashion.

Turbulent Times in Figuring out Social Media

What's new since the latest release of OTSM about a year ago? For one, the team working on this product seems to have been mostly rehashed. Many of the original bloomers have found other ways of channeling creative energy: from open source ECM to emerging technologies consulting.

Adding onto the Open Text Social Media Product

On the product side, Open Text continued on expanding its 2008 release with functionalities of blogs, wikis and other web 2.0 capabilities with a pinch of information governance by adding social workplaces and social media marketing features via the Vignette acquisition.

Building on that foundation, Open Text wants to help enterprises to use social media to drive marketing, customer support, sales and client engagement efforts. Inside the firewall, the focus is on productivity via the ability to create user profiles, follow colleagues and collaborate on projects. Here are some product highlights of this release:

Open Text Social Communities

Inherited from Vignette Community Applications and Services, this social media offering is for those who desire to engage with their customers, employees and partners with the ability to create web analytics- and search-friendly, social-enabled websites and microsites.

Open Text Social Communities includes such functionalities as photo and video galleries, slideshows, comments, ratings, forums, idea management, profiling, microblogging, etc.

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OTSW Community Feed

Open Text Social Workplace

Be social at work, but in a controlled way. Enterprise employees can interact and collaborate either in a stand-alone deployment, or as an integration with the Open Text ECM Suite and Open Text eDOCs.

Open Text Content Server Pulse

An update to Open Text Content Server, this product is about activity and content streaming via status updates and collaboration. Pulse is free for existing customers and partners.

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Pulse Profile

Plenty of Ways to be Social Anywhere

In addition to the above, Open Text has extended some enterprise social media functionalities to the recently released Open Text Everywhere.

With others playing in the enterprise social media space (Autonomy just recently release their version of doing social media in a governed way), choices are not that limited: from MOSS to EMC's CenterStage, to Jive and SocialText. With time, we should see even more players and much more sophisticated products in this market.