OpenText announced Version 10 of its popular OpenText Extended ECM for SAP® Solutions that now includes support for the SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) and SAP Supplier Relationship Management (SAP SRM) applications among numerous other enhancements.

SAP resells the solution under the name SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management (SAP Extended ECM) application by OpenText, giving its customers a comprehensive content management solution that integrates seamlessly with SAP business processes and puts unstructured content in a business context.

"The need to connect content to SAP business processes applies to virtually every industry segment," said Patrick Barnert, Vice President of SAP Solutions at OpenText. "That's why Extended ECM has already been deployed at more than 200 customer sites spanning some two dozen different industries, including energy, utilities, life sciences, and public sector. With this latest release, we are expanding on this success by adding in support for SAP CRM and SAP SRM along with new features based on customer feedback that will help to further boost operational efficiency."

With the release of OpenText Extended ECM 10, OpenText now helps enterprises improve customer-interaction efficiency by consolidating support documents such as contracts or email correspondence in one place and making them available through the SAP CRM user interface. On the supplier side, Extended ECM 10 extends SAP Supplier Relationship Management with vendor collaboration and content management inside the procurement processes of an organization.

"When we discuss long-term content management needs with customers, integration with SAP CRM and SAP SRM are two topics that come up frequently," said Tom Roberts, Global Vice President, Software Solutions Program, SAP. "They see considerable value in having these processes, which often require a lot of supporting documents, integrated with an advanced content management solution. Over the past few years, OpenText has proven to be a fabulous partner because of the high value they deliver to our customers, and we see this value increasing further with these latest enhancements."

The addition of a social stream in Extended ECM 10, called OpenText Pulse, allows team members to track recently added content from colleagues across the organization and quickly jump to the most up-to-date content. It also allows people to connect to each other and see the status or content updates from across the organization, besides allowing knowledge sharing and transparency as content is changed or added within core business processes driven by SAP solutions.

Other major new features in Extended ECM 10 include enhanced workspace access and permission control based on SAP roles and authorizations, tight integration with the Microsoft Windows desktop and Office applications, access to content via the SAP NetWeaver® technology portal, and advanced OCR capabilities for scanned documents (searchable PDF).

Organizations can also be confident that Extended ECM 10 meets regulatory requirements for records management and archiving. For instance, the new release passed Department of Defense 5015.2 certification requirements for records management for SAP solutions in February 2012. Since 2007, Extended ECM has been the only records management offering to achieve this certification in combination with SAP solutions.

SAP enterprise applications including SAP ERP, SAP CRM and SAP SRM require unstructured content such as email, presentations, contracts, photos, résumés and more to support business processes and transactions. Through the use of Extended ECM to help connect applications with content, enterprises find that the value of their content and their investment in SAP solutions is dramatically improved, leading to fast return on investment.

According to the IDC analyst, Melissa Webster, there is growing awareness at large organizations of the need to extend enterprise applications with ECM and to provide a holistic approach to information management. She notes: "Bridging these two worlds effectively is important from a business process efficiency perspective, and also for information worker productivity, and governance, risk, and compliance."

By MediaBUZZ