Open Text primes secure social network

Beverley Head
Monday, 30 August 2010 14:04

Business IT - Technology

Canadian content management specialist Open Text is edging closer to releasing a commercial version of a system it first trialled at the G20 meeting in Toronto in June, which allowed delegates to communicate and collaborate in a secure social network, sharing information over iPads, iPhones and BlackBerries.

“What you will see in the next month and further on is more mobile access,” said Conleth O’Connell, principal technologist with Open Text, during a visit to Sydney last week. He said that Open Text Social Media had been the platform used at G20 and that the company was now “looking at integrating that into our products.”

Dr O’Connell explained that there was something of a sea change taking place in the way in which enterprises stored and accessed information.

“The focus in the past has been so document centric. But if you took all the books and all the movies of the past and measured the storage associated with that it would be just a fraction of what would be needed for a year of emails and a year of newspapers.

“Then if you look at YouTube you are one or two orders of magnitude higher. The richness of information is growing as an exponential rate and it’s impacting organisations wondering what to do with that,” he said.

Dr O’Connell joined Open Text when the organisation purchased Vignette last year, where he had been chief technology officer. He likens the roles of the two merged organisations as complementary in the way that a restaurant’s wine cellar manager and sommelier rely on each other.

While Open Text had traditionally been in charge of the wine cellar, keeping information secure and properly controlled, Vignette played the role of the sommelier – offering up the right information for use when required.