Posted September 15, 2013 by Gregory Guttmann
Have you ever wondered what it means if a company runs OpenText? With more than a billion in yearly revenue and 5000 employees, you know that it's going to be a complex story, especially since OpenText has taken the approach of acquiring companies instead of just purely organic growth.
OpenText has 5 different Program Groups and here a brief glossary and history of the programs that make up the OpenText Customer Experience Management (CEM) program group:
This is the former Vignette flagship product for web content management. OpenText acquired Vignette in 2009. Originally called Vignette Story Server it was later renamed to Vignette Content Management (VCM). The V6 version of VCM was tcl based; V7 was the first Java release. To add to the confusion, OpenText purchased Hummingbird in 2006 which had purchased the RedDot web content management product a year earlier. The key thing to remember is:
Yes, focus carefully on those two names - because there are completely different technologies! If you're a customer and you're proposed one of those two solutions, make sure that the account executive can tell you why they're suggesting one over the other.
Also coming from the Vignette acquisition was the Vignette Portal. This product was created by Epicentric as one of the first commercial Java-based portal server, predating the WebLogic and WebSphere portal servers. It was been called a variety of names:
The OpenText Portal is a Java portal that is JSR-168/JSR-286 compliant. Astute readers will notice that the OpenText website is based off of the OpenText Portal. As well, OpenText is using the portal as an integration hub for its products.
Another product coming from the Vignette acquisition. This is the latest incarnation of a product that was first created by Intraspect. All of these names refer to the Intraspect product in one way or another:
The naming of OpenText Tempo Social is challenging because the Intraspect product is actually a framework for building applications and it is those applications that are usually sold to customers. Really the Intraspect framework consists of an repository to define objects and a web and REST interface to perform actions on them. Here are some of the names of applications that have been built on top of the Intraspect platform:
If you're looking at the current OpenText Tempo Social, note that it also includes the OpenText Portal. The Tempo Social functionality is exposed as portlets. That's not a bad thing - it actually gives you a very reasonable extensibility framework.
This is web application to build...web applications. The original product came from Application Park which was acquired by Epicentric and later Vignette. Over the years it has been called:
The OpenText Portal Builder surfaces WSRP portlets that can be displayed in the OpenText Portal. Although it is possible in theory, to my knowledge there hasn't been a single instance where OpenText Portal Builder portlets have been deployed to other portal consumers (like WebSphere or Oracle).
Another one from the Vignette acquisition. This is the Dialog product that was originally created by Revenio. It's a decent product for building multi-step automated email interactions.
This used to be known as Vignette Recommendations. It's actually just an OEM version of Baynote.
Hopefully this very short and incomplete product history will give you some insight into the main components of the OpenText Customer Experience Management suite.
-Greg