Open Text Launches Semantic Navigation

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Aug 17, 2010, 04:10 ET

New Offering Makes It Easy for Organizations to Take Advantage of Innovative Tools to Easily Improve Search Experience on Websites

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, Aug. 17 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ - Open Text Corporation (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTC), the preeminent provider of enterprise content management (ECM) software, today announced Open Text Semantic Navigation, an innovative tool that helps audiences naturally navigate through volumes of information based on the inherent meaning of the content and increasing Web marketing and online search effectiveness. Available as a cloud-offering or on-premise, Semantic Navigation gives organizations an easy way to improve engagement with online audiences.

The announcement was made here at the Search Engine Strategies conference, a leading global conference and training series focused on search engine marketing, taking place this week. Open Text is a top sponsor of the event and exhibiting in booth 214.

Companies of all sizes invest heavily to develop content they hope will boost brand awareness, sell goods and services, and increase customer loyalty. This content, however, can be spread across multiple servers and repositories where it is difficult for readers and search engines to find. Simple keyword searches assume the audience is willing to manually scroll through pages of results and hunt down countless blind alleys to find relevant content. Before long the audience becomes frustrated and goes elsewhere.

Forrester Research, Inc. made a similar observation in a January 2010 report titled "The Best and Worst of Site Search 2010": "People who visit your corporate Web site need to be able to find the information they seek. Depending on what they need and what they already know, your visitors may choose to browse or search. Great online user experiences are useful (deliver value), usable (provide easy access to value), and desirable. The search experience can either enhance or detract from the overall user experience."

Open Text Semantic Navigation offers a way to improve the user experience. At the core of the offering is the Open Text Content Analytics engine that intelligently extracts meaning, sentiment and context from content, and in turn marries that content to what a customer or prospect is looking for on a website. The result is that audiences more consistently and quickly find helpful, valuable information with much less effort.

"The volume and diversity of content continues to grow much faster than organizations can efficiently manage, meaning that the true potential of that content to boost audience engagement is never realized," said James Latham, Chief Marketing Officer, Open Text. Latham expands on these issues in an Open Text podcast with Forrester Senior Analyst Leslie Owens available here. "We believe semantic and content analysis technology holds significant promise for helping organizations change this equation. Open Text Semantic Navigation is a great example of the ways we are bringing this technology to market to help solve a number of difficult problems around content discovery and presentation."

Among the websites turning to Semantic Navigation is The Globe and Mail, Canada's National Newspaper. "We have a lot of conversations about Web-based opportunities at The Globe and Mail," said Kevin Schlueter, Enterprise Architect. "The common theme in many of these requests is the need for a sophisticated search and navigation solution. So, we looked carefully at what was available and chose Open Text's Semantic Navigation product. We now have a critical building block for the next generation of features we plan to build for www.globeandmail.com."

Rapid Results with Online Trial

A complete solution, Open Text Semantic Navigation is designed to complement any existing Web site, independent of the Web content management system used, either installed on local servers or as an online service provided by Open Text. With the cloud-based offering (currently in beta), organizations can rapidly and inexpensively upgrade their sites' user experience using a free, fully functional 30-day trial.

Once the trial is activated, Semantic Navigation first collects content through a crawling process. Then the content is automatically analyzed and tagged with relevant and insightful entities, topics, summaries and sentiments - the key to providing an engaging online experience. Next, content is served to users through intuitive navigation widgets that encourage audiences to discover the depth of available information or share it on social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. From there, Semantic Navigation supports placement of product and service offerings or advertising to convert page views into sales. To see Open Text Semantic Navigation in action, try out the search feature on www.opentext.com.

Beyond improving the audience experience, Semantic Navigation can also bring more people to an organization's website. It does this through delivery of authoritative and SEO-rich Web pages that are easy for search engines to discover. It also can help decrease Web marketing operating costs with its front-end flexibility and rapid deployment using industry-standard taxonomies.

Open Text Semantic Navigation is priced at $3,000 per month for the cloud-based offering following the free 30-day trial. There is a one-time set up fee of $10,000. For additional information and to sign up for a trial, go to http://www.semanticnavigation.opentext.com/.

Follow Open Text on Twitter: @opentext

About Open Text

Open Text, the preeminent enterprise content management software solutions company, helps organizations manage and gain the true value of their business content. Open Text brings two decades of expertise supporting 100 million users in 114 countries. Working with our customers and partners, we bring together leading Content Experts(TM) to help organizations capture and preserve corporate memory, increase brand equity, automate processes, mitigate risk, manage compliance and improve competitiveness. For more information, visit www.opentext.com.

Certain statements in this press release may contain words considered forward-looking statements or information under applicable securities laws. These statements are based on the Open Text's current expectations, estimates, forecasts and projections about the operating environment, economies and markets in which the company operates. These statements are subject to important assumptions, risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict, and the actual outcome may be materially different. Open Text's assumptions, although considered reasonable by the company at the date of this press release, may provide to be inaccurate and consequently its actual results could differ materially from the expectations set out herein. For additional information with respect to risks and other factors which could occur, see the Open Text's Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and other securities filings with the SEC and other securities regulators. Unless otherwise required by applicable securities laws, Open Text disclaims any intention or obligations to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Copyright (C) 2010 by Open Text Corporation. OPEN TEXT and OPEN TEXT SEMANTIC NAVIGATION are trademarks or registered trademarks of Open Text Corporation in the United States of America, Canada, the European Union and/or other countries. This list of trademarks is not exhaustive. Other trademarks, registered trademarks, product names, company names, brands and service names mentioned herein are property of Open Text Corporation or other respective owners.

SOURCE Open Text Corporation