OpenText released the Cloud 21.2 editions of its suite of enterprise content services in conjunction with its OpenText World Europe virtual conference on Wednesday.
Two new cloud services top a long list of new features. The first, Core Content, is a document management system offered as a shared public cloud service. It comes with integrations to major platforms such as SAP and Salesforce, as well as most OpenText applications.
Built organically by OpenText and available April 23, Core Content includes popular features from other OpenText applications, such as the advanced classification of metadata found in Documentum, which OpenText has acquired, and digital signatures. Core content integrations with Infor, ServiceNow, and Workday are on the way, said Muhi Majzoub, executive vice president and product manager at OpenText.
The second is Core Case Management for industries that organize interactions with individuals and customers as cases, such as healthcare, insurance, financial services, and IT support services. Like Core Content, Case Management takes the document, workflow, and model storage features found in OpenText applications and aggregates them into a cloud service. It will be available on May 7.
Other features OpenText plans to release in the coming weeks include Core for Federated Compliance. The tool takes governance of documents that users establish in Core document repositories and extends them to Microsoft Office 365. It simultaneously maintains access controls and other rules in OpenText and Microsoft repositories, including SharePoint and OneDrive.
Core for Federated Compliance may not be as glamorous as massive new cloud services, said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, founder of Deep Analysis, but he predicted it would be widely used.
OpenText Case Management, aimed at industry verticals such as insurance, financial services, and IT support services, organizes content around each incident or customer.
“Case management isn’t making the headlines – it’s not very exciting, but it’s important,” Pelz-Sharpe said. “That’s quite an announcement.”
Safety in the spotlight
Majzoub said the pandemic’s remote working demands required adjusting OpenText’s product roadmap to prioritize new tools to address remote work safety risks.
Case management isn’t making the headlines – it’s not very exciting, but it’s important.
Alan pelz sharpeFounder, Deep Analysis
“Overnight, the world went virtual and the CIO lost control of the network boundaries,” said Majzoub. “Employees can now be located anywhere in the world. My employees are in hundreds of locations, sitting at home, with different endpoints, routers, and service providers. “
OpenText, which has acquired many security technologies over the past decade, including Guidance Software and Carbonite, has an accessible tool that backs up and restores computers within hours if they are affected by ransomware. Other new features include updated threat information scoring for URLs and IP addresses; the current version runs hundreds of billions of calls per month to sort threat sites from legitimate pages, Majzoub said.
OpenText continues to integrate functionality into its nascent Experience Cloud. In CE 21.2, OpenText adds features for media management such as video annotations that enable collaboration between video editors and legal or marketing teams who review content before it goes live. Another feature allows users in the oil & gas and construction engineering verticals to view and zoom maps to 1000% without downloading them to mobile devices or laptops.
This solves a long-standing problem for engineers that can be a persistent problem in the field, where bandwidth can be short and users don’t necessarily need a full card or CAD document to access information they need, Pelz-Sharpe said.
