Open Text FirstClass Communities
FirstClass Communities
(renamed from OTSW - Open Text Social Workspaces)
FirstClass Communities 2.0 (update)
Video by Steward Lynch of Open Text inc.
FirstClass OTSW 1.0 (2009 release)
Open Text Social Workspaces brings together all of the social tools that have defined the modern internet into a safe organizational framework, where ideas prosper, knowledge is enhanced, and employee productivity thrives. This powerful Web 2.0-style solution has been designed to enable organizations to work faster, smarter, and more productively by connecting knowledge workers to the people and content important to them within a secure, collaborative community-based environment.
Relieve the stress of email overload. With open text social media, content is organized in specific communities by subject matter, enabling users to quickly focus on the information that is most important to them and reducing the volume of e-mails sent and forwarding among small groups. Generated content such as discussions, ask/answer worries, documents, and so on are immediately accessible to a wide network of stakeholders, significantly reducing
the e-mail burden and opening up new communication channels.At the core of Open Text Social Media are communities. Communities are easily created to bridge virtual teams and enable access to relevant content anytime, anywhere. Groups of people can work together electronically by sharing thoughts, opinions, and information through a combination of discussions, document/file sharing, and wikis. Communities are not limited to internal employees. Members of a community, with permissions, have the ability to invite internal stakeholders into a specific community. Group projects are enhanced by the participation and contribution of external stakeholders and all discussions are captured and easily reference by members.
I am very excited about the new addition to FirstClass! This is just a short summary and most of the features were mentioned in the FC 10 Roadmap. I use this during demonstrations to new and existing customers. Some features may not be in the released product, while other features that I haven't mentioned, could be.
Each user has a profile with an integrated personal blog. Users can choose to follow other users as well as message threads and topics. The system is built around communities. These communities are conferences on steroids. Posted items in blogs and communities can contain active content, such as videos from YouTube and maps from Google Maps. Users can also upload documents and create wikis in communities. FirstClass is very powerful for creating content collaboratively.
Other exciting news is that FirstClass Social Media is integrated with Microsoft Office 2007 and OpenOffice 3.0 using the WebDAV extension to HTTP. This means that Word documents, Powerpoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets (or their OpenOffice equivalents) can be edited straight off the server, without having to download them first. You can also connect to the server by mapping a network drive, which turns FirstClass into a file server, giving
you access to all files, using any application, as was intended with CIFS support a few years back. Also new is document versioning, which allows you to look at previous versions of uploaded documents and wikis.With the new super-fast indexed search, you can locate messages, documents, wikis, people and communities in milliseconds. The search results will be ordered by relevancy and are, of course, controlled by the user's permissions.
Users can join public communities or get invited to join private or secret communities. If they wish, they can opt to have all messages sent to their mailbox. Users can flag any item and get notified of changes to a message thread, document or wiki.
Community owners can invite external (non-FirstClass) users to join communities, without the need for these users to have to change their email address.
Consistently Easy to Use
When it comes to rolling out social media applications internally, organizations have turned to one-off or point solutions. Over time, this leads to a costly and confusing proliferation of applications and user interfaces. Open Text Social Media, by contrast, gives customers a consistent and integrated user interface.† This means, for example, that useful information such as online status, user pictures and profiles are always available regardless of context (in a wiki, in a discussion, documents area etc.) This consistency lowers deployment and maintenance costs, improves user adoption and reduces training requirements. Key features of Open Text Social Media include:
Personal Dashboard - Gives users a quick overview of communities, ìMy People,î My Watchesî and other pending and status details.
Communities - Provides a virtual space where a group of people can work together electronically by sharing ideas, opinions, and information through discussions, document sharing, and wikis.
Profiles - Lets users create/edit their profiles, add a photo, update their status, and view other peopleís profiles. Mini-profiles are generated automatically, allowing zero-click contextual display of a userís name, photo, contact information and presence status.
Blogs and Microblogs - Users can publish a personal blog with their profiles. Users can create, edit and delete their own blog postings, and view and comment on other peopleís blogs.
Wikis - The Wiki tab within a community provides a simple WYSIWYG wiki system. Page linking is supported and an automatic navigation pane expands as new pages are created. Users can edit, comment, view past versions, email out, tag and watch wiki pages
Social Search - Fast search delivers relevant content, people, and communities in parallel and displays relevancy-ranked results, while fully respecting permissions. Real-time indexing ensures immediate search results and handles all community data as well as many common file types.
Mobility - Users can access community information from smart handheld devices such as BlackBerry and iPhone.
More Info - Links
Presentation of OTSM --> OpenText Social Media Demo Video (Scott Welch - off site media 3 minutes)
Presentation of OTSM --> OpenText Social Media Demo Video (Scott Welch - off site media 12 minutes)
Link to some screen shots --> Social Media_firstlook
Link to some 'sneak peak' screen shots of the mobile client for Blackberry --> Blackbery_firstlook
Link to some 'sneak peak' screen shots of the mobile client for iPhone --> coming soon
More informaion on Firstclass Social Media - OTSM_Product_Sheet.pdf
More informaion on Firstclass Social Media - OTSM_Executive_Brief.pdf
If you have any questions please contact us
Common World inc.
608-875-5040
Last updated Sun, Mar 25, 2012 7:48 AM
FirstClass is a registered trademark of Open Text inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Currently this website is being updated and will be pushed over to the new FirstClass 12 Web Services. For the next couple months our new websites will be under development as we run real world tests of the new FirstClass API. We do apologize for anything that does not line up.