Open Text embraces SharePoint

Open Text last week added Microsoft SharePoint to the list of corporate repositories that can tie into its Livelink Enterprise Content Management System.

The new software, dubbed Livelink ECM Document Archiving for Microsoft SharePoint, lets users build a set of retention and archiving policies around documents to ease storage issues, help meet compliance mandates and secure the integrity of data contained within documents.

The software moves document files to back-end storage devices from EMC, HP, IBM, Sun and others, but leaves a link in SharePoint's database so users can easily retrieve the documents.

Livelink works with Windows' SharePoint Services (WSS), a feature of Windows Server for creating ad hoc collaboration and file sharing, and Windows' SharePoint Portal Server (SPS).

"For organizations with particularly high usage of SPS and WSS, they're going to start feeling the performance hit of all the historical data they have in there, but they know that just deleting stuff is not the answer," says Sarah Kittmer, a senior analyst at Ovum.

She says Open Text, which competes with Veritas, faces some challenges with its integration with SharePoint, including the fact that many organizations have yet to hit a document retention crisis point and that many users are waiting to see whether Microsoft will add some high-level archiving features to SharePoint.

Microsoft is trying to jump-start WSS adoption with the release in early August of 30 templates for building applications in WSS for time sheets, scheduling, event coordination and expense reimbursement.

Open Text hopes to control the flood of documents those applications could create by combining archiving with the ability to assign life-cycle management and records management policies. In essence, it adds a layer of information management between the front-end creation of documents and the back-end storage system.

Open Text has used Microsoft's .Net technology to add features and administrative tools to SharePoint that let users configure rules that define archiving policies and push documents to the archive server.

Open Text includes a feature called "Single Instancing'' as a way to eliminate the duplication of documents in the archive server. The feature uses a "hash key" assigned to each document to ensure that only one copy of a file is stored in the archive.

SharePoint is the latest in a line of network repositories that Livelink taps into - including Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange, SAP, Siebel, Oracle's PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards applications - as well as its own Livelink collaboration platform.

The Livelink ECM Document Archiving for Microsoft SharePoint server runs Linux, Unix and Windows. The software costs $30 per seat.

Read more about software in Network World's Software section.