SAP Portal Content Management by OpenText – An ideal Content Management solution for SAP Portal customers

Hi everyone,

As most of us can tell, the world around us is changing quickly. Cloud computing, big data, social networks, mobility… these paradigm changes bring new value to organizations, but, at the same time, also contribute to the ever growing amount of unstructured data, which results in… well, sort of a chaos.

Unstructured data, which varies from simple documents and files to social feeds, podcasts, videos, scanned invoices and many more, constitutes today more than 80% of the organizational data, and it is growing exponentially – it actually doubles every several months. Staggering, I know, but fact’s a fact!

It is therefore no wonder why 70% of the companies surveyed recently by the AIIM said plan on investing in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions in 2012. Even today, the ECM market is estimated at about 4 billion dollars a year. We’re talking big money here!

So what does this mean to SAP customers? SAP is the recognized leader of the structured, records-based world. Unstructured data, however, has not been a dominant part of the SAP portfolio historically. But SAP has since built a strategic partnership with OpenText, an ECM market leader. Together, they have brought to market several solutions that help customers integrate unstructured data into their business processes – Document Access, Invoice Management,Document Presentment, Extended ECM… just to name a few.

While those solutions cater for the more traditional SAP ‘Power’ users, there was still a gap to close when it came to the more ‘Casual’ users, the ones that use SAP systems sporadically, but still require efficient collaboration around documents. Enter SAP Portal Content Management by OpenText which does exactly that… and more.

Portal Content Management is a best-of-breed document management and collaboration solution which also supports web content management capabilities. It is deeply integrated into the SAP Portal, allows mobile consumption, features social collaboration, and helps to create beautiful-looking, content-rich websites based on the robust framework of SAP Portal.

So where does it stand as opposed to SharePoint?  We all know SharePoint has mushroomed in the last couple of years, but this proliferation comes at a cost – it resulted in a multitude of data silos across the organization. Portal Content Management avoids this by using a centralized architecture. Moreover, the perception of SharePoint as being ‘free of charge’ is misleading. This is not the case when the Enterprise Edition is required – you must then take into account licenses and deployment costs. Most importantly, it’s the connectivity with the SAP systems that truly makes Portal Content Management the system of choice for SAP customers – data objects are embedded into the SAP Portal (and Enterprise Workspaces pages) in a swift and easy manner.

Lastly, how is Portal Content Management positioned against Extended ECM (the ‘full-blown’ content management solution for SAP Power Users)? PCM provides an effective, low-cost solution for the more casual users. The right combination of both solutions ensures that the entire organization is covered at an optimal cost. Since both are based on the same OpenText architecture, leveraging one to the other is quite an easy chore.

I would love to hear your thoughts about this, so feel free to drop me a line.

Cheers,

Ohad

[Ohad.levy@sap.com]