New Release of OpenText Social Workplace Powers Purpose-Driven Teams
OpenText™ has announced the availability of the next major release of OpenText Social Workplace, a fully integrated social collaboration environment designed to help purpose-driven teams assemble, stay connected, and achieve breakthrough results.
The announcement was made at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. During a keynote presentation, Tyler Knowlton, of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade for Canada (DFAIT), showcased how Social Workplace is helping the G-20 improve collaboration among delegates from member countries around the world. Also at the conference, OpenText announced the Prize for Purpose-Driven Business, a contest to recognize organizations that are effectively dedicated to a purpose.
The Prize for Purpose-Driven Business is an initiative to showcase those teams and individuals who embody what it means to be a purpose driven organization and have in-turn used social collaboration tools to help achieve their missions. The Prize for Purpose-Driven Business is open to all organizations, whether they are current OpenText customers or not.
OpenText Social Workplace is a new kind of people-centric enterprise application that works through either SaaS or on-premise deployment. It helps cross-functional teams form quickly and collaborate effectively with minimal training or technical support. The latest release has a number of new features including optional integration with OpenText ECM Suite 2010 for comprehensive records management and governance, chat, and important additions to the wiki editor, among other enhancements.
“In a purpose-driven organization, teams are not limited by geography, function, hierarchies or management structure. They form by bringing the right people together for the right reason at the right time. These teams need new ways of collaborating and getting work done,” said James Latham, OpenText’s Chief Marketing Officer. “With this new release, OpenText Social Workplace is even more adept at supporting a fluid model of collaboration that allows teams to organize quickly and tap each person’s expertise to fulfill the team’s purpose.” Latham discusses how Social Workplace supports purpose-driven organizations in a new OpenText News Podcast posted today.
The Social Workplace experience is designed from the ground up to work the way people want to work, starting with a personal dashboard to drive personal productivity and provide easy access to everyone’s profile, status and blog. From there, community spaces unite distributed teams with the appropriate level of access. New microblogging capabilities provide an ambient level of awareness of activity throughout an organization. It now also incorporates chat to facilitate quick, real-time touches among one or more team members.
Compared to social media offerings from start-ups or smaller vendors, Social Workplace is backed by OpenText’s deep experience in delivering enterprise-class content management solutions. One way organizations can tap into that experience is to connect Social Workplace communities to OpenText ECM Suite 2010. This new option makes it possible for content created during a project to be automatically archived in compliance with an organization’s regulations and policies with full records management control to an enterprise content repository with minimal intervention from technical staff.
Inside the community, Social Workplace offers a number of tools for creating content using wikis, information feeds and document management, images and video repositories. With the latest release, wikis have been enhanced with support for tables and version comparison capabilities. Document handling is more robust with advanced commenting, versioning and comparison functionality.
Modern workforces require flexible access to content. Social Workplace can be accessed from any Web browser and mobile devices. Pre-built apps for iPhone and BlackBerry devices are available with support for the new release and allow people to log-in from any location, check tasks, review project details, update status and search for information.
Beginning in June 2011, teams will be invited to submit their most compelling stories about how having a clear sense of purpose impacted their team’s success. Entries will be accepted through September 30th, 2011. The entries will then be screened and finalists judged by a panel that includes the speakers from the OpenText Purpose-Driven Speaker Series including Simon Sinek, Andrew McAfee and John Seely Brown.
The new release of OpenText Social Workplace, version 2.0, is available now either for download or as a cloud-based solution. The Fast Start program offers a low risk way to get started and includes a 60-day full-version Social Workplace license for up to 950 users. OpenText also offers the public Social Workplace Sandbox community that allows people to experience the product at any time.
