Open Text Extends Web Search Technology Into Livelink 01/03/97
NewsBytes, Friday, January 03, 1997 at 14:56
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, U.S.A., 1997 JAN 3 (NB) -- REPEAT/By
Jacqueline Emigh. Open Text Corp. [NASDAQ:OTEXF] is now readying new
technology to extend the capabilities of Open Text, its search
engine, a product sold on a stand-alone basis, as well as being fully
integrated into the company's Web-based document management software
for the first time in the latest edition of Livelink.
Open Text Corp. originally produced the Open Text search engine only,
noted David Weinberger, VP of strategic marketing, during a briefing
with Newsbytes.
Because the search engine was able to understand SGML (standard
generalized mark-up language), most of its initial applications were
in the specialized arena of SGML, a precursor to HTML (hypertext mark-
up language). In late 1995, Open Text purchased Odesta, maker of
Livelink, a document management software product originally based on
SGML and used primarily in the oil, utilities, and pharmaceutical
industries.
Earlier that year, he recalled, Open Text had started to foresee that
the "hype surrounding the Web" would soon become reality, and that
many of the first important applications would take place on internal
Webs. In response, he explained, Open Text last spring brought out the
first Web-based edition of Livelink, dubbing the product Livelink
Intranet Suite 4,
According to Weinberger, the latest edition, Livelink Intranet Suite
7, adds at least a dozen new features in the areas of search;
workflow; project collaboration; and the LiveLink library.
Taken together, the new features are aimed at giving Livelink
increasingly greater support for "mission-critical, mainstream"
collaborative applications in Fortune 500 corporations, and at
allowing end users to perform more tasks by themselves, without
assistance from an administrator, he said.
Open Text's new search engine, also at the version 7 level, and fully
integrated into Livelink 7 for the first time, adds the ability to
search at three levels: Livelink documents; and documents on the
corporate network and Web.
Users can now search project, workbin, library, and report folders,
Weinberger said, adding that searches can also be conducted according
to "characteristics," a term used by Open Text to describe attributes
of meta data from SQL databases. These attributes include workflow;
SQL queries; workflow; maps; compound documents, aliases, or pointers
to documents; and "generation."
Open Text uses the word "generation" to describe a snapshot of the
contents of a compound document, at any given point in time, he
explained, adding that these snapshots are useful to corporations
because these documents, which are made up of multiple documents and
objects, tend to change over time.
In a related set of enhancements, end users can now add, modify, and
delete documents, and reorder sections within a compound document.
To promote project teamwork, end users can now create project pages
"in a single click, without the help of an administrator," as well as
to be alerted through e-mail of key events such as new messages or
task modifications.
According to Weinberger, users can now set priority levels and
expiration dates on notes posted to the project bulletin board system
(BBS).
The new version 7 also handles more than one level of threaded
discussion, the VP added. "You can ask to see only unread messages, or
only read messages, for example," he explained.
In addition, users can now view a list of who has read, modified, or
checked a document out of the library, through a newly introduced
audit trail capability. Managers, meanwhile, can drill down to any
level in the workflow process to see attributes, comments, and an
audit trail for each step of the process.
A new workflow status screen permits end users to select "archived,
not archived, and executing only" workflows.
Through new version management capabilities, users can trace
references to objects, including documents, aliases, generations, and
uniform resource locators (URLs).
Weinberger said that, in its two Livelink releases, Open Text opted to
jump from version 4 directly to version 7 to keep version numbers
consistent between its search engine and document management software.
He added that, in future editions of Livelink, Open Text plans to work toward increasing levels of scalability and high-end functionality.
"We have some really advanced searching in the pipeline, that will go a long way toward solving the problem of relevancy -- of making sure that the documents you find are the documents you really care about," he said.
More information about Livelink is available on the Web at
opentext.com.
(19970102/Reader Contact: Open Text 800-507-5777; Press Contact:
Brodeur Porter Novelli for Open Text, 617-587-2800/Reported By
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