EMC Corp. purchased Documentum in 2003 for $1.7 billion, a very high price tag at the time, and did not grow the core business.

In 2016 Dell completed the merger with EMC Corp., and sold the EMC Enterprise Content Division (ECD) to OpenText for $1.6 billion. It was announced as the beginning of a new era. OpenText explained that they were looking for a partner that shares their vision for the transformation to digital business, the passion for the role of information in the digital world, and the breadth of capabilities to help customers realize that vision.

Today, this business unit consists of Documentum, Project Horizon, EMC InfoArchive. Core Documentum products include the Documentum platform, xCP and D2, midmarket ECM solution ApplicationXtender, Captiva, and Document Sciences xPression; additional products include Kazeon, MyDocumentum, and eRoom.

As with all acquisitions, this one also helped OpenText to accumulate a large amount of customers. OpenText made it very clear that they will focus on protecting Dell/EMC customers’ investments with new innovations and continued support for all applications.

 

 

OpenText Customer Experience Management Strategy

 

Besides xPression, that was bought as part of ECD, OpenText actively expanded its CEM portfolio with its Communications Center (which includes previously acquired StreamServe and Actuate PowerDocs) and the addition of the former HP Exstream products in August of 2016.

As the Canadian software house had a lot of solutions, that partly overlap, it became clear that supporting and developing each of them down the long road would become not only costly, but also not logical.

 

 

Migrating from xPression to OpenText Exstream 16.4

 

Therefore, starting with version 16.4, OpenText finally offers its customers a migration path from xPression xDesign to Exstream Design Manager and Designer. xDesign is the primary design environment and the initial focus for a migration effort. It utilizes a galley flow structure. General layout is tree-based with rules. Content is driven from rules with nested structures.

The migration approach will utilize the document export functionality. xDesign templates exported in the pdpx format will be imported into Exstream for the foundation of template migration.  

Design Manager provides a favorable structure to move content to Exstream design templates. Exstream Design Manager and Designer has a similar concept that allows for migration and import transition.  

Exstream Design Manager manages object-oriented design elements in a similar tree structure.  The migration approach will look to utilize Design Manager’s section and paragraph objects as the new design source.

 

 

Conversion: What You Need to Know About 

 

• Most common design patterns from xDesign will be targeted by Exstream Designer
• Conversion will not be 100% automated. But OpenText offers here documentation and best practices. As always, OpenText’s in-house customers, and service partners will be offering help.
• Validation and testing against groups of documents submitted by dozens of customers
• Accessible from Exstream Design Manager and operates on PDPX template exports
• Detailed logging and reporting for content, rules, and resources for each converted template

 

 

Summary

 

From all the EMC customers, that became part of the OpenText user community after the acquisition, xPression customers can breathe freely again. OpenText proved its ambitions on saving their customers’ investments by offering a partly automated migration path from xDesign to Exstream Design Manager and Designer.

By upgrading to the latest supported version, customers will not only be able to benefit from new functionality and many innovative features, but also join a big community of Exstream users, which includes many Fortune 500 leaders.

In case your company is using xPression to generate documents, and is looking for an authorized and experienced service provider to help your team to upgrade to OpenText Exstream version 16, look no further. We at Ecodocx are happy to help. More information can be found here. Or just contact us directly.