Social rebirthing for OpenText ECM
OpenText is having another stab at weaning us off email as a collaboration tool, with a new social media add-on to its ECM platform it calls Bandaroo.
Built on OpenText Core, Project Bandaroo is described as “a collaborative environment that incorporates social communities, information and project channels, intelligent bots and secure information management to allow individuals and teams to work with information in a way that represents how people work today. “
This sounds a lot like what was announced way back in 2009 as the latest addition to the company's ECM Suite, Open Text Social Media.
At the time, Scott Welch, chief evangelist for social media at Open Text, observed that "We're doing too much collaboration through email. ... We need better collaboration tools."
Fast forward to 2016 and web-based collaboration startups such as Slack are gaining all the headlines. Comparisons have already been drawn between the interface to Bandaroo and Slack.
“Social technology really hasn’t made an impact on productivity,” said OpenText CEO Mark Barrenechea. “Our view will have an impact.”
Cathy McKnight, co-founder and VP of consulting and operations at New York City-based Digital Clarity Group, told CMSWire that Bandaroo “sounds a lot like Slack and Yammer, and even IBM Connections.” OpenText, she added, has "lots of vision and aspiration to be IBM-like — to be a leader and innovative. But as with all vendors, time will tell how it all comes to fruition.”
A second announcement made at OpenText’s annual user conference in Nashville last week was for Magellan, described as a next generation cognitive analytics platform.
OpenText Magellan will integrate visualisation, voice, video, search, text, natural language, semantics and numerics to deliver an easy to program, highly affordable cognitive platform. Magellan leverages open source technology, and runs on standard (x86) hardware, allowing companies, students, universities – everyone – to build applications that drive deep data insights and cognitive & predictive analytics based on structured and unstructured information.
OpenText says Magellan marks the democratisation of cognitive computing and it will be available in the second half of OpenText FY17.