Austrian Federal Computing Center Standardizes on Open Text for eGovernment Services

Open Text ECM Suite Now Provides Online Access to 5 Terabytes of Official Documents within Shared Services Center

WATERLOO - Open Text Corporation announced that Austria's Federal Computing Center, the leading IT services organization for the country's federal government, is now offering Enterprise Content Management (ECM) as a shared service using the ECM Suite from Open Text. Open Text's scalability and its breadth of ECM solutions and expertise for SAP applications contributed to the center's decision to implement the Open Text ECM Suite to help manage more than 30 million documents annually. The Austrian Federal Computing Center (officially known as the Bundesrechenzentrum GmbH) is the information and communications supplier for the country's federal ministries. The center provides computing infrastructure throughout Austria at more than 1,200 locations and oversees about 30,000 workplaces. Its solution to digitize the documents of the land and commercial registers of the Austrian Ministry of Justice was a finalist for the European eGovernment Awards of 2007.

Over the past two years, the center has expanded its Open Text-based ECM infrastructure to become an eGovernment platform. Applications are used at Austrian universities, the Austrian ministries of finance and justice, as well as at the center itself. In addition to four SAP applications, there are additional applications based on the Open Text ECM Suite for managing and legally archiving e-mails, projects, contracts and order management content. The Open Text ECM Suite is also used to manage metadata, allowing metadata extraction and management to be fully automated. In all, the center uses Open Text to manage more than 5 terabytes of information and supports 15 applications that are tightly integrated with SAP and mainframe applications. To help lower costs and reduce IT burdens on individual agencies, the center has moved to an application service provider (ASP) or shared services model. This means that ECM services are invoiced to the various organizations or customers using the applications based on their actual usage patterns. "The ASP model has been very well-received due to the transparency of costs," said Robert Grim M.A., head of the center's new e-government services. "Customers pay only for the services they actually use without having to worry about the associated IT costs."

The move to a shared services model was in response to increasing demand for a more centralized electronic storage and management system. For example, land and commercial registers of the Austrian Ministry of Justice have been managed digitally since the 1980s, but the paper documents were stored at each court house, the only places where they could be viewed.

"After a pilot study, it became quickly obvious to us that we could no longer think only in project-related terms; rather we had to build a scalable ECM solution that could meet the increasing demands of our customers," Grim said.

The criteria for selecting the best solution were not limited to cost/benefit ratio and functional scope, but also included performance, integration ability and scalability. Since the center serves both public agencies and private citizens, there was a need to provide both standard solutions, such as finance management mainframe applications, as well as point solutions. Following the scanning and central storage of documents, Austria's land and commercial registers, for example, can now be accessed via a register application over the Internet.

"Besides lower costs for archive maintenance, there are much greater process efficiencies concerning the land and commercial registers - both for companies and private individuals - now that they can be viewed anytime, anywhere online," said Grim.

The savings potential of the platform using the Open Text ECM Suite is far from exhausted, according Grim. The center has embarked on a project to archive originals of the millions of documents it produces each year, into the ECM platform. Because documents have to be reproducible in their original layout for many years, it was necessary to keep the design logic of the archived documents within the applications. With the Open Text ECM Suite, applications can be simplified considerably and administration costs reduced. Open Text's solutions are offered as part of the Open Text ECM Suite, the company's flagship offering. The Open Text ECM Suite brings together the broad range of content management capabilities organizations need to securely and safely manage all types of enterprise information documents, vital records, Web content, video, images, email, forms and reports across many different enterprise systems and applications.