Hummingbird Ltd. today announced the unveiling of Hummingbird Enterprise™ 2005, the next generation of its award-winning enterprise content management platform. The new release offers innovative, easy-to-use functionality to help customers maximize the value of their business content. Hummingbird will be previewing the new features and functionalities of Hummingbird Enterprise at Summit 2005, Hummingbird’s worldwide user conference, held February 7 – 9 at the Loews Miami Beach Hotel, in Miami Beach, Florida.
Hummingbird Enterprise 2005 is designed to address three key market requirements:
*Manage end-to-end content lifecycle processes from within Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Explorer, Lotus Notes Desktop, the Web Top and from mobile devices;
*Minimize deployment complexities and reduce total cost of ownership; and
*Ensure that critical business content is always traceable and auditable to mitigate risk and enable regulatory compliance and corporate governance processes.
“Hummingbird Enterprise 2005 is a major advancement and will radically change the way knowledge workers search and interact with their content and business processes, allowing them to work the way they want to work, by exposing the corporate information through fully customizable views of business data,” said Barry Litwin, President and Chief Executive Officer of Hummingbird. “The design principles around Hummingbird Enterprise 2005 are based on simplicity of the client interface, a scalable and highly secure content repository that supports global and multilingual deployments in a cost effective manner, end-to-end management of e-mail as a critical business asset, and re-usable solution templates that help accelerate the development of industry-specific enterprise content management solutions.”
According to Gartner Research Director, Toby Bell1, “Regulatory compliance, legal discovery and other needs have driven organizations to seek access to and control over content enterprise-wide. The typical organization has many separate applications that generate documents and content, each stored in dedicated repositories. To maximize the value of their application investments, organizations need a single, comprehensive view of what’s there, simple access, and the ability to distribute the content to various business applications and to incorporate it in workflows.”
Leveraging the new capabilities of Hummingbird Enterprise 2005, Microsoft Outlook users will be able to easily manage and organize e-mail, documents, physical records, reports, workflows and more, all from within the familiar Outlook interface. The customizable business views expose all the capabilities of Hummingbird Enterprise including content management, records management, collaboration, workflow, search, and reporting from within Microsoft Outlook.
Hummingbird Enterprise 2005 also includes a brand new desktop search capability. With the new release, personal desktop search capabilities are seamlessly linked to the enterprise content management suite, providing knowledge workers the ability to search and access all of the content stored on their PC and all of the information in the enterprise in a single interface.
Hummingbird Enterprise 2005 provides an enhanced hierarchical security model and enhanced security of metadata with DoD 5015.2 certification including the rigorous Chapter 4 requirements. In addition, the integrations of Business Intelligence reporting and Data Integration capabilities provide an advanced and unique facility for customers to track and report on how Hummingbird Enterprise metadata and content is used, thereby providing traceability in order to meet today’s stringent regulatory compliance and corporate governance requirements.
In addition to the new desktop clients for Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes, desktop search capabilities, and hierarchical security for advanced records management, Hummingbird Enterprise 2005 also features a number of other significant enhancements, further cementing its position as the ideal content management solution delivery platform, including:
*Automation of Repetitive Content Management Processes: Significantly reduces administrative costs and end-user time by automatically applying metadata, security access permissions, organizational folder structures, retention and disposition schedules based on business rules and templates.
*Enhanced E-mail Management: Users can directly drag an item from Microsoft Outlook to a Hummingbird Enterprise folder, a workspace, or a library – the system automatically completes the profile for the user to accept or modify. Users can create personal rules for e-mail capture using the e-mail client Rules Wizard and Administrators can create rules at the e-mail server for consistent message capture across groups of users or the entire firm. As part of this release Hummingbird Enterprise 2005 will also support integrations with market leading e-mail archival vendors.
*Improved Language Support for Metadata and Content – providing global customers operating in multiple geographies and languages with the ability to profile, store, manage, and search profiles and content of documents in both ISO Latin 1 and UNICODE-based languages.
*Industry-Specific Solution Templates such as contract management and correspondence management that are designed to accelerate the implementation of mission critical enterprise content management solutions.
*Secure Instant Messaging on Mobile Devices: Extends the existing ability to securely collaborate in real-time to wireless devices, including BlackBerry®, Palm and Pocket PC.
*Simplified API Model for Integration: Integration time is significantly reduced, resulting in faster deployments of Hummingbird Enterprise within the customer’s strategic business system infrastructure.
“The primary business benefits that our customers will derive from Hummingbird Enterprise 2005 is low cost of deployment over pre-existing IT infrastructure investments, scalability to support global enterprise content management deployments, and a highly secure framework that enables organizations to reduce and manage risk,” adds Litwin. “The innovative and user-friendly functionality truly enables our customers to work the way they want to work, enabling better collaboration, greater accountability and compliance, and improved productivity.”
Availability: A comprehensive beta program for Hummingbird Enterprise 2005 is scheduled to commence in Q1 2005. The suite is expected to be generally available this summer.
