Software rivals rev up app integration efforts

Collaborative software competitors Open Text and SiteScape this week are scheduled to upgrade their offerings with options that provide improved real-time sharing and application integration capabilities.

The products are designed to make it easier for corporate end users to collaborate while also capturing and storing the resulting discussions and documents for future reference.

Open Text is releasing Version 2.0 of its Meeting Zone software, which provides real-time collaboration and now is integrated more closely with the company's Livelink knowledge management repository. Open Text also is adding two modules to Livelink, one that supports natural language search and another that highlights new information based on a user's interests.

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Collaborative software competitors Open Text and SiteScape this week are scheduled to upgrade their offerings with options that provide improved real-time sharing and application integration capabilities.

The products are designed to make it easier for corporate end users to collaborate while also capturing and storing the resulting discussions and documents for future reference.

Open Text is releasing Version 2.0 of its Meeting Zone software, which provides real-time collaboration and now is integrated more closely with the company's Livelink knowledge management repository. Open Text also is adding two modules to Livelink, one that supports natural language search and another that highlights new information based on a user's interests.

SiteScape is releasing its Enterprise Forum 7.0 software, which features tighter integration with corporate databases, and new calendar, editing, document management and workflow capabilities. Forum 7.0 also has new role-based authorization.

For Open Text, Meeting Zone 2.0 represents the company's attempt to evolve the real-time capabilities it introduced last year. Open Text has added a meeting template that is used to save outlines of meeting agendas and materials for reuse when setting up additional meetings. The software also has a "reconvene" feature for recurring meetings.

"Many times a meeting gets extended or rescheduled," says Frank Chafee, senior developer for PVA Global, a system integrator in Burlington, N.C. "Previously in Meeting Zone you had to rebuild an entire new meeting. Now you can just hit a button to set up that new meeting." Chafee says the company uses Meeting Zone to present online product demonstrations to customers. PVA's success has led it to start reselling the product, he says.

Open Text also has added application-sharing capabilities that let users store their work in the Livelink repository, and a slideshow feature for presenting Microsoft PowerPoint presentations from the Meeting Zone server, which runs on Windows NT and 2000, instead of distributing the presentation to each meeting participant. Open Text is expected to add Unix support in January.

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Meeting Zone is priced at $200 per user.

Open Text also introduced Recommender and Naturalizer, two modules for Livelink expected to be available next month. Recommender catalogs documents a user accesses and suggests additional information for him to view.

Meanwhile, Enterprise Forum 7.0, which runs on Win 2000 or NT, Sun Solaris and Red Hat Linux, includes support for Microsoft's SQL Server 2000 and Oracle 8i databases to go with the custom database that ships with the software.

The company also has added new document management, workflow and editing features, which allow users to view documents without losing the native formatting. Enterprise Forum 7.0 supports 200 file formats.

The software also is integrated with the calendar and notification capabilities of Microsoft Outlook and includes a task feature that can be integrated into discussions, workflows and documents.