Blackberry Mobility Featured Article

Enterprise Content Management, or “ECM,” software provider Open Text Corp. has announced it is extending the reach of its ECM solutions to mobile devices. This move is part of a strategy designed to help organizations to harness the power of today’s mobile workforce in an effort to increase productivity.

The company is also unveiling a new application as part of this strategy. Open Text Everywhere is designed to make the entire Open Text ECM Suite available through mobile devices. With a primary focus on BlackBerry (News - Alert) smartphones, the company has announced a first set of mobile applications today with plans for more to be added in the next year.

“We call them ‘smartphones’ but the fact is they can take over the role of laptops,” said Eugene Roman, chief technology officer at Open Text, in a statement. “The power of smartphones is only growing and they offer an entirely new platform to extend the productivity of workers in ways we never imagined just a few years ago.”

Based on research conducted by IDC (News - Alert), the time is right for mobile content applications as smartphones are continuing to gain in power and grow as a critical tool for productive mobile professionals. In fact, the number of mobile workers accessing enterprise systems throughout the world will top the one billion mark this year.

In a 2009 Forrester (News - Alert) Consulting study, it was observed that, “BlackBerry devices enable workers to be more efficient and productive in their daily work activities. These productivity benefits vary depending on the type of employee using the BlackBerry device, the range of mobile applications deployed over these devices, and the maturity deployment stage of the organization.

For example sales professionals can improve weekly productivity by 1 to 2 hours per week in a reactive deployment organization, 4 to 7 hours per week in a proactive organization, and 13 to 21 hours per week in an integrative organization. Significant productivity benefit ranges are also achieved by field service and executive management personnel.'

Today, the biggest applications dominating smartphones are e-mail, calendaring, messaging, personal contacts, and entertainment.  With this growing mobile workforce, access to more enterprise content, business processes and collaborative tools normally reserved for the desktop or laptop will increase.

“Statistics like those are hard for senior management to ignore as they look to grow their business with shrinking budgets,” said Roman.  “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.  Open Text Everywhere will let CIOs extend the productivity power of mobility across their business.”

Open Text Everywhere is expected to deliver a comprehensive view of business processes, content and workplace social collaboration tools through native applications that are unique to each mobile platform. The first applications will be released for BlackBerry smartphones, although support for other mobile operating systems is part of the company’s long-term strategy.

Open Text Everywhere will provide such applications as Manage everywhere for documents and content; Engage everywhere focusing on process workflows; and collaboration everywhere using social media.

Expansion in late 2010 will add: Mobile applications for Vendor Invoice Management and other Transactional Content Management solutions, integrated with SAP (News - Alert); Mobile applications for its eDOCS document management solution targeting mid-market enterprises; and mobile social media applications based on Vignette Community Services and Vignette Community Applications.

Early 2011 will see a mobile email management application that lets customers manage email for legal, regulatory or corporate governance rules; and a mobile website content management application that allows customers to manage and post web content, respond to emergencies or manage outages.

In other Open Text news, the company announced in February it had inked a third partnership with SAP AG. This was the third major expansion of an “already successful” strategic relationship to include Open Text Digital Asset Management a key component of the Open Text ECM Suite and a part of marketing resource management and intellectual property management capabilities of the SAP Customer Relationship Management application.

Last month, the company introduced a range of fax gateways designed to provide a source for all fax over IP – or FoIP – needs of organizations of all sizes. Open Text Fax Gateway (News - Alert) solutions can help customers to lower the total cost of ownership through the consolidation of voice and data network equipment for fax.