Open Text launches apps for mobile workforce

SINGAPORE: Open Text Corporation, a provider of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software, said today it's extending the reach of its ECM solutions to mobile devices in a bold new strategy designed to help organizations harness the power of today's mobile workforce to increase productivity.

As part of its strategy, the company is unveiling a new application called Open Text Everywhere, which would make the entire Open Text ECM Suite available via mobile devices. Focusing initially on BlackBerry smartphones, the company announced a first set of mobile applications today with plans for more in the year ahead.

The time is right for mobile content applications, as smartphones gain in power and grow as a critical tool for productive workers on the go. According to IDC, the number of mobile workers accessing enterprise systems worldwide will top one billion this year.

This increasingly mobile workforce would demand access to more enterprise content, business processes and collaborative tools normally reserved for the desktop or laptop. Today, the biggest applications dominating smartphones are email, calendaring, messaging, personal contacts, and entertainment.

"We call them 'smartphones' but the fact is they can take over the role of laptops," said Eugene Roman, chief technology officer at Open Text.

He added that the power of smartphones is only growing and they offer an entirely new platform to extend the productivity of workers in ways we never imagined just a few years ago. Business does't stop when we leave the desktop or the laptop. It's time to unleash business content, processes and applications to go wherever employees need them on a smartphone. Open Text Everywhere will let CIOs extend the productivity power of mobility across their business.

Open Text Everywhere would deliver a comprehensive view of business processes, content and workplace social collaboration tools via native applications unique to each mobile platform, said the release.

The first applications would be introduced for BlackBerry smartphones, but the company also plans to support other mobile operating systems in its product strategy. The application uses the BlackBerry platform's secure connection transportation layer for fully encrypted wireless communication, and uses the same permission model to allow mobile users to access content in the Open Text ECM Suite.