If you read my Editor's Corner this week, Moving beyond ECM, you might find it a bit ironic that Open Text this week announced a huge enterprise content management (in the fullest extent of the term) release. Open Text says the new suite incorporates more than 90 (90!) products and services as it attempts to be the soup to nuts enterprise content management solution.

You want compliance? Got that. How about portal design and management? Uh huh. Internal social networking? Document capture? Yup and Yup. I'm fairly sure you would be hard-pressed to come up with a content management-related technology that's not in there.

What's interesting is that Open Text has developed a platform based on many pieces it has purchased over the years such as Vignette portal and Nstein semantic search. It claims that these pieces are all fully integrated and "best of breed," but you have to wonder as a consumer how it's possible to take these disparate pieces and make them all work together smoothly.  

Open Text CTO, Eugene Roman, says his company has developed a way to incorporate all of the purchased pieces. "Over the past several years, Open Text has aggressively moved to a services-based architecture and implemented sophisticated development processes that enable us to quickly and efficiently integrate new and future functionality no matter if organically developed or acquired. As the biggest R&D achievement in Open Text's history, ECM Suite 2010 will help our customers easily plan their future ECM strategies."

That's clearly what Open Text hopes will happen, but we will have to watch and see if it's still desirable or realistic for a single company to provide you with the full range of enterprise content management technology. Open Text hopes to prove it is.

For more information:
- see the Open Text press release

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