Based in Waterloo, Ontario, Open Text has made a name for itself in marketing its Livelink software suites for document, knowledge, and business process management. In more recent years, the company has expanded to add project- and document-based Web conferencing tools. Now, the company is poised to roll out enterprise IM as part of that platform.

"In the mid-90s, [Open Text] started to realize that there's kind of an important correlation between document management systems and the work people were doing around documents," said Jared Spataro, director of collaboration solutions at Open Text. "Around 1997 or so, the company started to focus on collaborative functionality around documents, and since that time, we've continued ... to add increasing amounts of support for collaboration."

As with standalone consume or enterprise IM systems, Livelink Instant Messenger offers users a standalone contact list, or "Buddy List," highlighting online users' availability information. But the system also closely integrates availability -- or "presence" information -- into Open Text's Livelink document and project management environments.

"Livelink offers document management/collaboration -- it's a very solid content repository store, and on top of that, collaboration interfaces like project and team meeting rooms. We started getting a lot of demand in the 2001 and 2002 timeframe to extend the real-time collaboration functionality to not just meetings ... but to do real-time, ad hoc interactions," Spataro said.

For one thing, the system integrates with Livelink's user directory, which tracks personnel and their projects. As a result, the integration enables IM contact lists to be populated with a user's colleagues on current projects.

"Some of our customers use our project shared space every time they spin up an engagement for one of their clients. Once it's plugged into and integrated with Livelink, it maintains your own Buddy List. No longer do you need to dynamically maintain these lists. If you're working on four different projects, the system maintains your Buddy List for you as people enter and exit the projects," Spataro said.

IM and presence also appears throughout the Livelink suite, in document stores, discussion threads, and elsewhere. Presence-enabled usernames also can enable Livelink users to click to initiate a Web conference or e-mail.

"It takes presence and integrates it into the system, wherever a username is used," Spataro said. "People are always posting documents and reversions, for instance, and there's a name associated with it ... there can be a whole shared space within their environment, and the system associates their username with it, and with each, that user's presence is displayed. You can add contributions to discussion threads hosted in the environment, so presence is displayed there, too."

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