Technology Releases - Document Management

Open Text™ Corporation, (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTC), a global leader in enterprise content management (ECM) today announced that South East Water, a Victorian Government-owned provider of water and related services, has strengthened its records and document management practices with the deployment of Open Text Content Lifecycle Management (CLM) Services for Microsoft SharePoint.

The new software is providing lifecycle management services for approximately nine million physical and electronic records, all of which are maintained in two distinct enterprise content management (ECM) systems – Microsoft SharePoint and Open Text's ECM Suite.

The introduction of a single CLM solution has made it possible for South East Water to extend its VERS (Victorian Electronic Records Strategy) compliant Open Text records management policies and practices into the organisation's Microsoft SharePoint environment. This allows the application of consistent retention and disposal policies across all of the organisation's records and, for the first time, is enabling staff to conduct a single search across the contents of both systems.

South East Water has a long history with its two ECM environments. The Open Text solution was introduced as an asset management tool in 1997 while Microsoft SharePoint has provided collaboration and workflow support since 2003. The latter is used extensively by engineering and project teams, and provides the platform for the organisation's external website, its intranet and alliance partner extranet.

Marcus Darbyshire, Chief Information Officer of South East Water, said, “We've had strong records management practices for printed material for many years but electronic content hasn't received quite the same attention. It tended to be stored in repositories such as SharePoint, Open Text or shared drives.  Documents were rarely archived and there was always the risk of accidental deletion.”

As part of the software implementation, South East Water's project team conducted extensive research into staff and management attitudes towards records management practices.  A new set of policies was developed to streamline processes, better engage staff cooperation and to take maximum advantage of the organisation's new unified records management capabilities.  These policies and an overview of the capabilities are now being rolled out to records managers and key stakeholders.

Benedict Chiu, IT Systems Analyst and Open Text technical lead at South East Water, commented, “The holy grail for many organisations is to understand and maximise the value of their content.  This deployment takes us one step closer to achieving that. The Open Text module is seamless and straightforward to use but it's also important to remember that policy must drive the tool.”

Darbyshire adds, “The benefit of this deployment is the peace of mind that it offers around document lifecycle management.  As a water provider our assets can live for 100 years or more.  Applying the Open Text records management capabilities to SharePoint means we now have the security of knowing that our information is not being deleted before its time. It is properly managed and can be easily found.”

About Open Text

Open Text, an enterprise software company and leader in enterprise content management, helps organisations manage and gain the true value of their business content.  Open Text brings two decades of expertise supporting 50 million users in 114 countries.  Working with our customers and partners, we bring together leading Content Experts™ to help organisations capture and preserve corporate memory, increase brand equity, automate processes, mitigate risk, manage compliance and improve competitiveness.  For more information, visit www.opentext.com <http://www.opentext.com>

Release Disclaimer
Copyright © 2010 by Open Text Corporation. OPEN TEXT and the OPEN TEXT ECM SUITE are trademarks or registered trademarks of Open Text Corporation in the United States of America, Canada, the European Union and/or other countries. This list of trademarks is not exhaustive. Other trademarks, registered trademarks, product names, company names, brands and service names mentioned herein are property of Open Text Corporation or other respective owners.

For more information:

• www.opentext.com

<a href="http://www.whatech.com.au/technology-releases/document-management/965-south-east-water-provides-lifecycle-management-for-nine-million-records-with-open-text-solution">South East Water Provides Lifecycle Management for Nine Million Records with Open Text Solution</a>

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