By Anne Widjaja
OpenText has released of version 10 of its popular OpenText Extended ECM for SAP Solutions, which now includes support for the SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) and SAP Supplier Relationship Management (SAP SRM) applications.
The OpenText Extended ECM solution is used to connect SAP applications such as SAP ERP, SAP CRM, SAP SRM, to the unstructured content (such as emails, resumes and presentations) required by these applications to support business processes and transactions.
Patrick Barnert, vice president of SAP Solutions, OpenText, reports that the Extended ECM solution has already been deployed at more than 200 customer sites across almost two dozen different industries, including energy, utilities, life sciences, and the public sector. Barnert said the decision to provide customers with additional support for SAP CRM and SAP SRM in the new Extended ECM 10 was based on customer feedback.
According to OpenText, the new release helps enterprises improve customer-interaction efficiency by consolidating support documents, such as contracts or email correspondence, and making them available through the SAP CRM user interface. On the supplier side, the application extends SAP SRM with vendor collaboration and content management functions, within the procurement processes of an organisation.
Tom Roberts, global vice president, software solutions program, SAP, explained that the support of SAP CRM and SAP SRM is a need that often arises for customers with long-term content management needs. He said customers “see considerable value in having these processes, which often require a lot of supporting documents, integrated with an advanced content management solution”.
The addition of a social stream in Extended ECM 10, called OpenText Pulse, will allow team members to track recently added content from colleagues across the organisation, and allows users to connect to each other from across the organisation in order to see each other’s statuses, or most up-to-date content updates.
Other major new features of the solution include enhanced workshop access and permission control based on SAP roles and authorisations, tight integration with the Microsoft Windows Desktop and Office applications access to content via the SAP NetWeaver technology portal, and advanced OCR capabilities for scanned documents. The release also meets regulatory requirements for records management and archiving.
