OpenText Social Workspace powers South African research collaboration

Issued by Global Research Partners for CIO Forum
Johannesburg, 15 Sep 2011

OpenText today announced that Citizen1, a social collaboration platform for research in South Africa, uses OpenText Social Workplace. Citizen1 was established in collaboration with the South African Academic CIO Forum and the Centre for Chief Information Officer Research in Africa (CenCRA), at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT).

OpenText Social Workplace is also used as the collaboration platform by the G20 group of countries. OpenText was commissioned by the G20 world leaders to build a real-time collaboration platform on the principles of social networks in order to facilitate real-time conversations during and in-between meetings.

As a close partner of OpenText in South Africa, the CIO Forum was invited to join the pilot of OpenText Social Workplace and the G20 platform.

“We immediately saw the value of OpenText Social Workplace to support our research,” commented Roderick Lim Banda, Co-Chair of the Academic CIO Forum. “When we helped establish the Master Information Officer (MIO) course offered through CPUT and CenCRA, our aim was to provide a qualification for aspiring IT leaders and chief information officers. We now have over 80 researchers in Africa and associated collaboration initiatives. We initially made use of social media platforms, but found these were not suited for the kind of collaborations we were undertaking.”

“Citizen1 will support three main areas of collaboration that the CIO Forum and CenCRA have undertaken, namely: research, knowledge management and monitoring and evaluation,” added Andre de la Harpe, Chair of CenCRA.

“While we have a wide range of research topics, our social programmes are focused around the issues pertaining to the use and development of information communication and technology in government and communities. Our aim with Citizen1 is to develop our research areas in collaboration with other communities and enterprises. We want to develop informed conversations and debates on development, and OpenText Social Workplace provides the tools to facilitate this.”

“One of the features that will be useful is the integration with OpenText ECM Suite 2010 for comprehensive records management and governance, chat, and important additions to the wiki editor,” concluded Lim Banda.

“Flexible access to content is also important. OpenText Social Workplace can be accessed from any Web browser and mobile devices. Prebuilt apps for iPhone and BlackBerry devices are available with support for the new release, and allow people to log in from any location, check tasks, review project details, update status and search for information.”

For further information, please contact Rob Shaw: tel (+27) 83 626-3811, fax (+27) 86 646-4178, e-mail rshaw@opentext.com.

OpenText

OpenText, a global ECM leader, helps organisations manage and gain the true value of their business content. OpenText brings two decades of expertise supporting 100 million users in 114 countries. Working with its customers and partners, it brings together leading Content Experts to help organisations capture and preserve corporate memory, increase brand equity, automate processes, mitigate risk, manage compliance and improve competitiveness. For more information, visit http://www.opentext.com.

In southern Africa, OpenText's business partners are Business Connexion, Datacentrix, eTechnologies, iFuture Consulting, NokusaEI and SAP Africa; and its customer base includes organisations from across both the private and public sectors, such as ABSA, Anglo Platinum, BMW, Department of Environmental Affairs, Department of Tourism, Distell, Engen, Exxaro Resources, Mittal Steel, Nedbank, Office of the President, Provincial Government of the Western Cape, SABMiller, Sasol, Standard Bank, Telkom SA and Toyota.

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Copyright (c) 2011 by OpenText Corporation. OPENTEXT and OPENTEXT SOCIAL WORKPLACE are trademarks or registered trademarks of OpenText 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 OpenText Corporation or other respective owners.

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