Village Gamer

OpenText™ has announced a new release of OpenText Social Communities (version 8.1), that helps companies promote and drive the shift to a social business model. It accomplishes this by combining a comprehensive social framework with a set of ready-to-deploy applications for quickly building and engaging communities.

In this context, a social business is defined as one that includes a social component in all of its business functions and that provides effective collaboration and customer engagement opportunities across geographies helping it to earn market confidence and trust with its users. But becoming a social business is no easy task and is not done with technology alone: organizations must leverage social media in the context of existing business processes and meet security and information governance requirements. With its new Social Communities offering, OpenText is breaking through these barriers with a set of social apps that can socially-charge individual business processes all within the context of a secure and compliant enterprise-wide social framework.

“There’s no question that shifting to a social business provides employees, customers and partners with a more effective method of communication that increases employee effectiveness and improves customer engagement,” said Eugene Roman, Chief Technology Officer of OpenText. “For this release of OpenText Social Communities our emphasis was on helping customers apply social media in a strategic way to improve and augment the flexibility of their core business functions and processes while strengthening the back-end to meet enterprise requirements for security, privacy and compliance.”

OpenText delivers a complete, enterprise-level social media framework that can reach far across an organization’s online presence. This new release builds on the security and governance of the OpenText ECM Suite to apply appropriate controls to social objects, opening the door to more productive and safe sharing of content, helping customers balance the power of social media with the need to address and manage compliance issues.

This framework opens the door to a number of compelling use cases scenarios that can be rapidly deployed using Social Communities. Some examples include:

• Financial institutions use the Web and social analytics features with Social Communities to help measure visitor/member level engagement and contribution metrics to monitor customer engagement and measure the effectiveness of social media.
• Governments providing citizen services use Social Communities to ensure that employees are able to easily post approved content to external websites and community forums, making it easier for the public to gain access to relevant timely information and increasing transparency.
• Using the new ideation app, a technology company quickly pulls together ideas from engineers from around the world helping to boost innovation and reduce time to market.
• Manufacturing firms balance the risk vs. the rewards of social media through the ability to integrate social capabilities, in a compliant fashion, with the rest of its Web, intranet, and extranet properties and enterprise applications. This creates a safe environment of dialogue to foster informal collaboration and networking to help improve idea sharing, increase productivity, and speed the rate of innovation.

As smartphones and tablets gain widespread adoption, Social Communities integrates with OpenText Wave, OpenText’s Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP), which enables organizations to create, develop, and deliver compelling mobile applications for employees, partners, and customers.

Seamless integration with OpenText Web and Social Analytics offers the ability to monitor and measure social activity. By analyzing real-time visitor and social interaction information, organizations can optimize online initiatives and identify actionable trends within their visitor base, and capture user events that are specific to business goals.

To help promote and manage sharing between public social networking sites into a community site, Social Communities now gives users the ability to post content from a community site to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ and other social networks.

Social Communities 8.1 provides a set of ready-to-deploy social applications for social intranet, social marketing and social workplace workloads. These are complemented by reusable and adaptable site templates with the flexibility to combine features as needed to meet specific goals, such as launching a brand, product or campaign.

“It’s rapidly becoming an app-centric world and the new way to engage with customer and employees is through social business,” added Roman. “More and more we are seeing instances where customers want to quickly deploy social applications to enhance existing business processes or improve the customer experience. That said, they also want the applications to be enterprise-ready with robust provisions for controlling access, distribution and long-term governance of content.”