ECM fabric minimizes social media risks, ensures compliance

By Khoo Boo Leong | Jul 6, 2009

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Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube have rapidly gained popularity in recent years. Although online social media clearly offers new ways for enterprises to improve collaboration, workflow and information sharing, there have been concerns around security, intellectual property protection, knowledge preservation and compliance.

But now, there is a way out of Enterprise 2.0 wilderness. To help enterprises apply social media securely and effectively, Open Text has integrated social media technologies tightly into an enterprise-ready content management infrastructure.

Above all, the Social Media application in the Open Text ECM Suite is the latest piece of an “underlying social fabric of trust and teamwork which binds people together and connects them with the processes and content they need to achieve their goals”.

Access control

Access to corporate content is controlled by setting permissions to enable access and a maximum number of simultaneous users for load governance. That includes support for Apple iPhone and RIM BlackBerry devices, a boon for workers on-the-go. Already, additional device support is being planned.

“Device-specific mobile applications give users full access to everything offered in Open Text Social Media through their handheld devices,” said Cuneyt Uysal, product manager of the Open Text Web Solutions Group.

“The mobile applications are very similar in feature breadth to the web interface. For example, one can review documents, reply to threads and edit wiki pages, as opposed to simply consuming information.”

Through enabling Secure Socket Layer virtual private networking, Open Text Social Media manages who has access to information and enables content to be safely shared beyond the firewall to include customers, partners and suppliers.

“Identity management can be managed by external meta-directories such as Active Directory,” said Uysal. “Internally there is a powerful permissions and access control structure that ensures extranet users only see what they have permissions to see. No third party software is required.”

For instance, each community can be declared as public, read-only, secret or invitation only. These levels of access control cover the major use cases for social collaboration. Users can invite one another to communities, if they have the permission, enabling viral growth.

The product permits users to invite others from within the intranet, from the extranet or from the public, classifying them and allowing access based on the email domain. A trusted corporate domain could be abc@opentext.com. Further customization can be made to link user’s identity, permissions and job roles, for instance.