OpenText InfoArchive Reviews

The two main use cases are for sunsetting applications and keeping data when you don't want to pay the full licensing costs for the application. For example, for archival purposes, you may need to keep all that data where you have three accounting systems in your sunsetting from mergers and acquisitions. You can move this data into InfoArchive.

Another use case is moving data out of large systems to make them manageable. So, if you have a large Oracle SAP implementation, you can move all the data from a certain period out of that system. It is still online and accessible for reporting and moving into InfoArchive.

It has a strong XML engine for reading data and making it indexed and searchable. Therefore, it is easy to get data into it and set up searches without much coding. Also, it has a good license model and is licensed based on the amount of content put in it. Therefore, you can get started relatively inexpensively and build it over time as the need increases.

Something can be improved with every product. They can continue to grow the solution to scale it and make it easier to configure. It requires a decent amount of XL mapping. They should also have more out-of-the-box connectors or integrations for common applications.

We have been using this solution for eight years.

It is very stable. 

It scales very well. We haven't completed any massive implementations, but we've never run into any scalability issues with the implementations we have.

The number of users varies drastically and depends on what data is archived. For example, the users will be HR if HR data is archived. Or, if you're archiving financial system data or line of business applications, the users will be different. It's not licensed per user but on the amount of content in the system. So you can have as many users as you want.

Maintenance only requires a fraction of the resources. It generally doesn't take up full-time resources to manage and administer. It's low-key once the system is in place and set up.

We brought in OpenText InfoArchive because we were already partners when it was an EMC product. Text bought the products in the toolkit when we were working with documents, and it used a common framework and required similar skill sets to what we were already doing. We did not work with other archiving platforms except another open-text product called Cazion, which doesn't exist anymore.

The initial setup was medium complexity. It requires a specialized skill set and training, but once you're trained, it's pretty straightforward.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. I would advise others to start with one or two key projects and build on them over time instead of trying to do too much at once. Like most technology projects, pick an application you need to archive and start building on that. There is usually one project that drives the need, and once it's in your environment, other business owners will need it and want to use it for other applications.