ECM fabric minimizes social media risks, ensures compliance

By Khoo Boo Leong | Jul 6, 2009

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 [6]. Further customization can be made to link user’s identity, permissions and job roles, for instance.

Key features

Users, including those on BlackBerry and iPhone, can access community information such as ideas, opinions and information posted on discussions, blogs and wikis.

They can create or edit their profiles, add a photo, update their status, and view other people’s profiles. “Mini-profiles are generated automatically, allowing zero-click contextual display of a user’s name, photo, contact information and presence status,” Uysal pointed out.

Users’ profiles will appear with their personal blogs. Users can create, edit and delete their own blog postings, and view and comment on other people’s blogs.

Each user has his or her own Personal Dashboard which offers a quick overview of communities; My People which is an activity stream of status updates and recent blog posts of the people the user is following; My Watches which is also an activity stream but of communities the user has declared an interest in; and other pending and status details.

The Wiki tab within a community provides a simple WYSIWYG wiki system. Page linking is supported and an automatic navigation pane expands as new pages are created. Users can edit, comment, view past versions, email out, tag and watch wiki pages.

To set up a photo or video sharing platform, the product currently allows users to create a community with photo and video resources within the document repository. In a future release, Social Media will integrate with Open Text's Digital Media offering, formerly known as Artesia.

“Within the rich editing environment, one can embed content such as YouTube videos that are accessed remotely,” said Uysal. “We are looking at adding in support for feeds from public social sites such as Facebook and Twitter to auto-populate specific communities.”

Other items being discussed for future product inclusion include poll and survey tools and connectivity to customer relationship management, a learning management system or other enterprise business solutions, according to Uysal.

Managing overload

Deploying a social media platform inevitably leads to an increased amount of information generated. So, content services offered by the ECM suite become critical.

The search engine delivers relevant content, people and communities in parallel and prioritizes results based on a complex relevancy ranking algorithm, while adhering to set permissions.

Search spans all content such as blogs, wikis, documents and threads, as well as user profiles and communities. Real-time indexing handles all community data as well as many common file types.

Highly viewed information and communities rate higher than less frequently viewed information much like Google PageRank. Voting on content, or providing a content rating, is being considered for the roadmap.

Information lifecycle

Another critical functionality that is important not only for managing large information volumes but also for records management, archiving, compliance and e-discovery is information lifecycle management (ILM).

“Through integration, content created in Open Text Social Media can be managed using the content lifecycle tools and capabilities the enterprise already has in place,” said Uysal.

The common ECM activities – such as search repository, opening documents, sharing and discussing documents – are available through the Social Media interface.

The advantage, then, for a specific vertical is that through integration with the ECM Suite, content in Social Media can be placed on legal hold, indexed and searched across all users, and then collected and presented to counsel in a usable format.

“This can reduce or eliminate the need for third-party processing,” said Uysal. “Essentially all the capabilities available to customers for email and other enterprise content – using the same set of security, compliance, and archiving policies – are available to customers using Social Media.”

Beta test

“Like most federal government departments, we are very email centric and keeping people up to speed involves sending project updates and supporting documents to already over-loaded inboxes,” said Art Monette of Canada’s Federal Judicial Affairs, one of the organizations that beta-tested the solution.

“Open Text Social Media offers us central project sites with user profiles, discussion feeds, documents and wikis – everything in one place to keep everyone up to date,” Monette added.

“This alone is a huge time saver. The ability to set up user profiles with photos and background information makes a big difference in helping people from cross-functional teams in different locations to work better together.”