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Open Text Corporation, a global leader in enterprise content management (ECM), recently announced that The City of London Corporation has selected Open Text to provide a comprehensive corporate records management and archiving solution.

The City of London Corporation is responsible for the needs of its residents, businesses and over 340,000 people who come to work in the 'Square Mile' everyday, creating vast quantities of both physical and electronic documents and records. Among bodies that provide local authority services, the City of London Corporation is unique; with over 800 years of history it is the oldest "local-authority-type entity" in the country. The organisation prides itself on combining its ancient traditions and ceremonial functions with the role of a modern and efficient local authority.

The volume of information that must be securely managed, meant that in February 2006 the City of London Corporation embarked upon a project to identify a robust, scalable and economically viable solution to meet their needs. They needed to source a solution that would enable them to deliver better services to the hundreds of thousands of residents, visitors and businesses they interact with daily, as well as to create a better working environment for its staff.

Roger Marshall, IS Director at the City of London Corporation commented: "The City of London Corporation is over 800 years old and archiving our growing number documents and records has been an issue we've been trying to address for some time. In planning a major building refurbishment, which involved the decanting of existing archives, we engaged a consultant to advise us on how we should mange our archiving moving forward. He proposed we should not just archive new documents, but also digitise them by implementing an electronic document and records management system. We saw this as an opportunity not to just change the way we archive documents, but also improve our business processes."

At the time the City of London Corporation had already embraced Information Technology to improve its service delivery. However, there were limitations and the current systems didn't enable employees to share information with ease. This lead to the duplication of files and time wasted searching for the right information. The result, an overall decrease in efficiency amongst staff, as the volume of information continued to grow.

Employees were spending an increasing amount of time accessing and searching physical files in the archive; a new solution was required that could deliver both digital archiving as well as corporate wide records management.

Following a rigorous two-year tendering process, Open Text Livelink ECM was selected in June 2008 and the City of London Corporation plans to start deploying the solution in October this year.

Roger commented: "Throughout the tendering process we reviewed a number of the leading vendors in the market, all of which offered basically what we needed. We chose Open Text Livelink ECM because it was the most user-friendly. This was essentially what tipped the balance for us."

Roger concluded: "We see Open Text as the answer to helping us meet a common corporate standard in line with the government's National Best Practice Scheme and eventually leading to one single source of truth, eliminating the duplication of both electronic and physical files. Eventually we hope the solution will reduce the need for paper based files and ultimately bring greater efficiencies, which will reflect in the service we offer our residents."

Simon Lill, Sales Director, Public Sector Open Text commented: "It is a real privilege to be working with one of the oldest and most prestigious councils in the country. We hope that through the implementation of Livelink the City of London Corporation will be able to continue to offer a great level of service to its residents for a further 800 years."

About Open Text
Open Text, an enterprise software company and leader in enterprise content management, helps organizations manage and gain the true value of their business content. Open Text brings two decades of expertise supporting 46,000 customers and millions of users in 114 countries. Working with our customers and partners, we bring together leading Content Experts 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

Open Text Content World Open Text will host its Content World 2008 conference in Orlando, Florida, November 18-20. The event will bring together leading ECM experts from across the industry to network with peers, discuss the latest developments and trends in ECM and Enterprise 2.0, and to gain a first-hand account of the company's long-term strategy and product roadmap. For more information, go to: www.opentext.com/contentworld/2008

CONTACT: Richard Warner, Spreckley Partners Ltd Tel: +44 (0)20 7388 9988 e-mail: warner@spreckley.co.uk

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For full details on Open Text Cp (OTEX) click here. Open Text Cp (OTEX) has Short Term PowerRatings of 6. Details on Open Text Cp (OTEX) Short Term PowerRatings is available at This Link.

SOURCE: Open Text