Content Management Tools Dig Deeper

Customers taking advantage of plummeting storage costs to use unstructured data in unique ways have pushed the development of enterprise content management tools that dig deeper into business processes. EMC Corp., Interwoven Inc. and OpenText Corp. are preparing tools that permit more aggressive management, utilization and access limitations on content.

This week, EMC will unveil its revamped Documentum content management platform featuring a unified architecture with a single source to handle content and its relation to software, security, object models and repositories, said officials in Hopkinton, Mass.

To augment the platform, EMC plans complementary software for its Content Services, Process Services and Repository Services suites. Content Services has federated search that can find content across external heterogeneous repositories; EMC Documentum Content Transformation Services; and EMC Documentum Client for Outlook, an interface harnessing Documentum in Microsoft Corp.s Outlook.

Holly Godfrey, a technical consultant for Atlanta-based energy provider Southern Co., said she is interested in seeing if Content Services can help her get a handle on her organizations e-mail quagmire. “Certain e-mails pertain to business process and business records,” said Godfrey. “By having a clean integration with Outlook, youre giving business users an opportunity to say this is important enough to keep in a secure environment.”

EMC Process Services features the new EMC Document Collaboration Services, which help users take advantage of integrated collaboration tools and Documentum applications. The new EMC Documentum Repository Services enable simplified building of retention policies for events, precondition disposition and multiple phases, said officials.

Sources said Interwoven, of Sunnyvale, Calif., will soon unveil a content provisioning tool that offers regulatory accountability, including audit trails to capture application activity. The tool will feature enhanced version-control capabilities with snapshots of application instances and fully searchable and detailed reporting features to analyze past deployments.

Meanwhile, OpenText next month will begin rolling out Web content management system changes that extend the functionality of its ECM (Enterprise Content Management) suite to online publishing. Other new applications to debut later this year will tap OpenTexts SOA (service-oriented architecture), said officials of the Waterloo, Ontario, company.

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