In an effort to improve user adoption rates and reduce training costs for new applications, Open Text has announced the latest release of Enterprise Connect, the user experience application within the Open Text Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Suite.

"With organizations continuing to face economic hardship, users are being asked to do more with less and can ill-afford to struggle with learning new user interfaces," said Lubor Ptacek, vice president of product marketing at Open Text. "Enterprise Connect is the ideal way for organizations to simplify the user experience."

The application allows users to access and interact with business content directly from familiar desktop applications, such as Microsoft Office and Outlook.

The new version – called Enterprise Connect 1.5 – goes one step further to integrate Open Text”s ECM solutions with pre-existing applications, by offering drag and drop functionality from multiple repositories, single sign-on, metadata classification, federated search, and U.S. Department of Defense-compliant records management. It also features improved scalability and performance, as well as an enhanced software development kit and a document viewer that supports more than 200 file formats.

Open Text also plans to expand its enterprise content management offerings to include its recent acquisitions of web content management providers Vignette and RedDot.