Open Text breaks Livelink Web 2.0 dependencies

Until the end of last year, customers that wanted to add a social networking or wiki-style component to an Open Text ECM deployment were limited to Communities of Practice, an add-in that works only with Livelink.

But acquisitions such as Hummingbird eDOCS meant parts of Open Text's customer base couldn't deploy Web 2.0 capabilities natively.

This led to the creation of the Bloom initiative, which launched at the end of last year, according to Cheryl McKinnon, portfolio manager at Open Text.

"What we wanted to do was create something that doesn't have a lot of the backend dependencies that Communities of Practice has, opening Web 2.0 to our other brands," McKinnon said.

"The Communities of Practice also predates the term Web 2.0. It includes a lot of functionality that customers expect but because it was developed earlier in time it doesn't have the slick web engagement layer that customers are looking to adopt."

McKinnon said Bloom's main differentiators from its predecessor are that it breaks dependency from the Livelink platform and that it offers customers a richer, AJAX-style user interface.

Open Text is also looking at how to port this experience over to mobile devices via a client rather than a browser-based interface.

The Communities of Practice product would still continue to ship outside of Bloom, she said.

Vice-president of Asia Pacific, Graham Pullen, said large enterprise customers were demanding ways to deploy Web 2.0 capabilities in a controlled, secure and risk-averse manner.