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7th February 2011

OpenText Improves Digital Continuity for the British

OpenText has been awarded a framework agreement for Digital Continuity, developed by Buying Solutions and The National Archives in the UK as part of the government’s project to improve digital information management throughout the public sector.

Open TextDigital continuity is the ability for an organization to use information in the way that is needed, for as long as it’s needed. Usable information is essential if the public sector is to operate transparently and legally while maintaining accountability.

The Digital Continuity Framework is part of a broader Digital Continuity Service offered by The National Archives and provides a shortlist of suppliers which can be accessed by anyone in the public sector to help them manage their digital continuity. OpenText has been awarded a framework agreement for two Lots: digital archiving solutions and data quality solutions.

OpenText’s Senior Account Manager for Central Government, Stephen Walsh, said: “The exponential growth in digital data volumes presents a challenge to any organization; but it places particularly huge demands on public sector organizations. Without effective data management systems in place, digital information can become incomplete, unavailable or unusable over time. If government bodies cannot guarantee access to this data, it can have a serious negative impact on service provision to the public – and also threatens their ability to operate legally.

“The UK government fully appreciates the necessity of managing digital continuity, but it’s often difficult for individual public sector organizations to know how to improve their digital information management, or how to procure technology and services that will help them do this. The Digital Continuity Framework is an extremely welcome tool that makes it easy for the public sector to procure the tools they need to manage this mountain of digital data,” continued Walsh.

The Digital Continuity Framework agreement is for two years, with the option to extend it for two additional one year periods. The criteria for the Data Quality Solutions Lot of the framework required technology that enables users to access data from a variety of structured data sources; relate data between distinct data sources; and profile the data using patterns, rules and statistical methods. It also required the ability to drill-down into the actual data from a profile produced by the technology; provide a range of reporting options; and suggest or fix identified data quality issues.

The Digital Archiving Solutions Lot specified technology that can acquire information from a live system into the archive; manage retention policies applied to the archived information; place archived items on hold to override any other retention policy; and ensure the integrity of the archived information. Furthermore, it must enable user discovery and retrieval of the archived information; report on the contents of the archive; control access to the content of the archive and record provenance data about items transferred into the archive.

“The award of the Framework agreement for Digital Continuity recognizes OpenText’s expertise in the field of digital data management; and we look forward to working with public sector bodies to help them ensure that key digital information remains accessible and usable in the long term,” said Walsh.

Early last week OpenText also announced portal solutions now available as part of OpenText Portal 8.1.1 that will enable customers to create best in class social-, content- and customer-centric sites. The new OpenText Portal software includes a set of powerful portlets that allow users to easily mashup content from Microsoft SharePoint, OpenText ECM Suite and many other sources into a single, highly flexible and personalized interface, for intranet, extranet, or customer-facing websites.

With social networking tools shifting the way users want to consume information, OpenText Portal (formerly Vignette Portal) gives corporate users a way to easily navigate across applications, create and manage folders and documents while staying in context of their personalized workspace. OpenText Portal provides powerful, yet simple interactive views of people and content that help information workers become more productive.

“Combining complementary technologies from OpenText and Microsoft provides the ability for our customers to create composite mash-up applications and views based on a blend of SharePoint 2010 and OpenText content,” said Kim Akers, General Manager for Global Partners at Microsoft Corp. “The result is increased user productivity, by contextually delivering content from multiple silos into a single source.”

The OpenText Portal plays an important role in the OpenText ECM Suite by providing a richer, more interactive presentation layer, connecting disparate systems and enabling organizations to take advantage of their existing investments. The offering includes several new portlets — web components that can be aggregated in the context of a composite page – that enable information workers to more easily locate, leverage, and collaborate around information.

The portlets for OpenText Content Server, the core content management server within the ECM Suite, include an activity feed portlet, a navigation portlet as well as a federated search portlet:

· The activity feed portlet helps connect the global enterprise by providing access to the unique, social collaboration tools offered by OpenText Pulse. By streaming work status, updates and notifications – similar to the popular Facebook social networking site – employees can keep up to date on the activities of their colleagues, identify expertise throughout the organization, and collaborate around concepts and content. Any phase changes, bottlenecks, timeline changes, and other project statuses can be easily relayed to others.
· The navigation portlet for Content Server provides information workers with a tailored, snapshot view of content they are working on, a personalized workspace that spans various repositories, or any other document centric activity they may be involved with. This simplifies content access, streamlines “time to locate” critical or often used documents, and eliminates the need to search and work across various instances of Content Server.
· The federated search portlet provides the ability for users to submit basic or advanced searches across multiple Content Server instances file systems, databases and custom application to federate search results into a single customizable view.

Portlets for Microsoft SharePoint include navigation portlets as well as federated search portlets:

· The navigation portlet provides the ability for users to navigate one or more SharePoint instances and complete the most common document management tasks like View, Edit Properties, check in, check out, and approve. It provides the ability to configure filters and view across lists, sites and site collections for a more engaging content-centric portal site.
· The federated search portlet for SharePoint provides the ability for users to submit basic or advanced searches across multiple SharePoint instances, Content Server instances, file systems, databases and custom applications to federate search results into a single customizable view.

“The release of these new portlets highlights OpenText’s ability to deliver content-centric sites through powerful content aggregation and to give users instant access to critical business applications, processes, and information,” said Lubor Ptacek, Vice President of Product Marketing, OpenText. “OpenText Portal provides a highly scalable and efficient means of aggregating content and applications for use across a variety of initiatives inside and outside the firewall.”

This entry was posted on Monday, February 7th, 2011 at 9:12 am and is filed under Business News, Digital Products, National News, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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