I work with the business users who are using it. I work at a Utility Gas company. We have a storage team set up for post-project document storage, and now we are setting up the transmission pipeline team with both mid-project and post-project document storage.
By implementing Extended ECM, we were trying to address the challenge of retention management. The biggest challenge with our previous solution was retention management. We are working on implementing a pretty complicated schedule of retention for different documents connected to assets. Extended ECM has a lot of capacity for this kind of work.
It has been a rallying point for us for document management. Previously, we had solutions very siloed in different parts of the company, and we are now starting to bring a lot more groups together under the same platform. That is pretty huge.
We have been working on tying it to SAP and a bunch of workflow management solutions that we already had in place. We are trying to bring the underlying document management layer into the same home. That has been going really well, and then we have some great ties into some data sources that we use to validate metadata. We get a bunch of information from the GIS system. These are still early days, but the hope for the future is that we can eliminate a lot of duplication of documents and we are able to do proper retention. We are able to get rid of documents when we are ready to, but we are also making sure that we have them, and we can find them.
The integrated capabilities of Extended ECM have been good so far, but we struggled with figuring out how to relate integrations from cloud storage to on-prem systems and what security issues are involved. It took a while, but it is mostly solved now. It has been good, but I remember that was a thing that we were struggling with for a while.
Extended ECM has helped connect our content to our business processes. We have been building either new workflow systems or rebuilding old ones onto new platforms, either the ECM itself or AppWorks sitting on top of it. We have been doing very well in terms of getting people off terrible email-based processes and onto managed systems.
Extended ECM has helped to increase productivity in our organization. We have been seeing a lot of reduction in downtime due to issues with not having everything in a well-regulated system, which led to things getting lost or forgotten. We are eliminating those hiccups and increasing efficiency.
Retention is useful. I have been pleased with the search functionality and the extensibility for tying it into integrations with other systems and building workflows on top of it.
I have not used it enough to start running into issues. Some of my technical guys could name a couple of things, but in terms of support, we did have challenges getting good responses from them.
I have been using OpenText Extended ECM for a year.
It does not go down. There are occasional issues with a new release that have to be worked through, but nothing crazy.
Scalability is why we chose it. So far, it has not proven to be a terrible idea.
We have been working with some vendors. A part of the reason why we have been working with vendors is that we did have some challenges with their solution group, which is like a part of their tech support team. We did have challenges getting good responses from them. They have gotten better by going through an intermediary vendor that is experienced and can already answer a lot of the issues that we have been having. Based on my second-hand knowledge, I would rate them a seven out of ten.
We were working with a smaller company called Syntax. We were using their document management and workflow management solutions. They were good, but we needed something that would scale up better and also had better documentation retention capabilities than what that had.
I was initially involved in the very first parts of deployment, but then I got out and was focused on the legacy solution. Now that we are more ready to move the legacy solution into the new solution, I am coming back to the project. So, I was not super involved, and even if I was, I do business systems analysts work. I am not involved at a technical level except for a single question or two here and there.
I have not done the numbers, but I can see where it would be.
It is a little more expensive than our previous solution, but because of the fact that it has become a rallying point for different groups to come under, it might end up paying off better in the long run by not having seven siloed solutions. Even though this one solution is a little pricey, it might eliminate other ones.
Overall, I would rate OpenText Extended ECM a nine out of ten.