Open Text has announced its Enterprise Library Services, which provides a comprehensive offering for integrated records, metadata, archiving and storage management for all content types across an enterprise. The offering gives customers a single "trusted repository" delivered as a shared service for all content, allowing customers to set consistent rules for managing and archiving content to meet compliance and business requirements, while helping organizations reduce storage costs.
Open Text Enterprise Library Services is one of three new content services announced today at Open Text's LiveLinkUp 2007 conference. The three form the basis for a next-generation content management framework that takes a unique, repository-agnostic approach to ECM, eliminating the content and process silos created by different systems by decoupling the user experience from the underlying information repositories.
Open Text Enterprise Library Services provides the critical foundation for a true enterprise-wide ECM strategy, allowing organizations to manage content and metadata in a single, consistent way. Information is archived and stored based on a lifecycle defined by records retention and disposition rules and the value of the content to the organization, using records management that is already U.S. Department of Defense 5015.2-STD-compliant (a key standard for records management software used in corporations and government). Enterprise Library Services integrates with SAP and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, as well as Open Text products, including Livelink ECM, Livelink ECM-eDOCS (formerly Hummingbird Enterprise) and Artesia (RedDot will be integrated next year).
"Customers can't solve corporate-wide content management challenges without a single records management and archiving system that applies one set of ground rules to all content," said Kirk Roberts, president, Livelink ECM Division at Open Text. "It's critical to meeting compliance and legal rules, but the benefits go far beyond that. Enterprise Library Services gives customers a single system with the power to, once and for all, organize the daily onslaught of email and documents that flood their systems every day. The result is lower costs and great value for IT, and improved productivity for staff."
An important benefit of Enterprise Library Services, according to Roberts, is that customers gain added value from critical systems such as email by adding a ready-to-use records management and archiving system that can manage content for the long term. Customers can improve the performance of systems such as email and be assured that content that must be retained for many years is being properly archived and managed outside of systems that are designed for short-term storage.
Enterprise Library Services solves customers' biggest storage challenges because it uses Open Text's Intelligent Storage Management (ISM) capabilities. Rather than have storage requirements define where content is stored, ISM virtualizes storage and lets retention rules, policies and the importance of content define how information is stored, right down to defining specific storage devices. Open Text integrates with all major storage systems from leading vendors such as EMC, Hitachi, Sun, HP and others, so customers have the flexibility to use any combination of storage systems they want. Because the rules governing how information is stored is independent from the storage devices themselves, customers have the flexibility to change out older storage systems without having to worry about the content stored on those systems.
Enterprise Library Services also provides a robust search capability, including brokered or federated search, helping users easily search content in multiple systems to find the information they need. The federated search capability lets users enter a search term and receive unified results from multiple search engines inside and outside of the company's systems.
