As organizations increasingly embrace mobility and cloud computing some are also looking for new ways staff can collaborate and share documents beyond legacy systems.
New cloud-based services are being released, some of which are sophisticated file sharing solutions while others try to replicate collaboration suites behind the firewall
The latest is OpenText’s Core, announced Wednesday at its Enterprise World conference in Orlando.
Core is a multi-tenant subscription service called “a complete enterprise-class information management solution,” by Muhi Majzoub, the company’s senior vice-president of engineering. “It’s aimed at enterprises who don’t want software on premise for document management,” he said in an interview.
Accessing structured and unstructured data in existing storage, it offers an HTML 5-based viewer including document and folder management, a scalable database infrastructure, replication for high availability, collaboration capabilities with access controls and the ability to markup and edit in Microsoft Office, and an audit history of documents.
For those who need secure communications users can create a document from within Core and make it available to public through a secure URL link.
Core can be configured to create spaces and groups to replicate any physical or virtual organization structure. An administrative dashboard gives access management and remote wipe control.
One of the main features the company will use to convince customers to sign up is security: Core runs on the OpenText Cloud infrastructure used to host its other applications on a network that doesn’t cross onto the public Internet.
In addition, it offers a degree of data sovereignty: Customer data stored on Core can be held in one of 10 countries where OpenText has a data centre.
That’s in contrast to some competitors, Majzoub said, who give no assurances where customer data is stored or who say that they own customer data. “We will never own their data,” he said, “we will never spy on their data, we will never share their data with other entities.”
Majzoub said Core competes against Box and Google Drive, both of which have business versions.
Alan Pelz-Sharpe, an industry analyst with 451 Group, said the list should include EMC Syncplicity, Citrix’s ShareFile Podio and Google for Work.
Core at the moment is available by private registration. comes in four versions: Free, with limitations on the number of users and amount of storage; Team ($5 a person per month); Business ($10) and Enterprise ($30).
In an e-mail Pelz-Sharpe said he’s “quite impressed” with Core. “The fact that they have gone beyond simply providing yet another file sync and share system, and rather are providing a solid platform to build secure collaboration makes a great deal of sense. I think they have two big advantages here. Firstly it is built from scratch to meet enterprise needs, that is a differentiator for sure. But secondly and more importantly I think is that fact that they have a data center infrastructure that means they can promise data sovereignty to its clients that want or need it. That is huge for them and something almost no one else can do right now.
“For OpenText as a company it has, in my opinion, relied for a long time on maintenance fees from a legacy customer base and acquisitions for growth. This is a big commitment to bring in new greenfield customers and grow the company as a whole.”
Majzoub said OpenText is already thinking ahead to adding new capabilities. By March there will be an private cloud with encryption capabilities for organizations that don’t want to be in a shared environment.
