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OpenText Output Extender

Extend the value of your Enterprise Information Management investment to include output from ERP and mainframe systems

Learn More About How OpenText Can Help You

  • Overview
  • Business Needs
  • Products
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Overview

OpenText™ Output Extender helps you route and share critical information in the right format with customers, employees, partners, and suppliers across your enterprise.  It extends your organization’s enterprise information management strategy by capturing output and orchestrating the transformation of content into the desired format for your target audience and destination device.

The right format for the right device at the right time

Output Extender is unique in its ability to handle reports and statements generated from “legacy” mainframes, ERP and other large batch scheduled jobs. Output Extender supports formatting of mainframe output for ingestion to Content Server, eDOCS and SharePoint, extending the content sources and data types available to ECM and providing a single user experience when searching or viewing mixed report and document content.

By exposing mainframe and other batch scheduled output within your ECM environment, report content can now participate in your ECM strategies and business initiatives, such as:

  • Lifecycle management, collaboration, business process management and information governance
  • Online electronic statement and bill presentment; customer self-service
  • Legacy Application decommissioning; archive migrations

Output Extender orchestrates the capture, translation and multi-channel distribution of “report” content.  Supported formats include AFP, PCL, Metacode/DJDE, PostScript, line data, TIFF images, XML, PDF, PDF/A and PDF/UA.

Universal Accessibility Compliance

Output Extender helps companies comply with global accessibility legislation and standards, such as:

  • Americans with Disabilities Act
  • Sections 504 and 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act
  • Section 255 of the Telecommunications Act
  • Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act
  • UK Equality Act
  • European Accessibility Act
  • EU Mandate 376
  • Australian Disability Discrimination Act
  • UN Enable

By transforming mainframe reports, PDFs, and high-volume print stream documents into WCAG 2.0 Level AA-compliant formats, such as PDF/UA and large print, companies and government agencies can provide consumers universal access to the digital information they provide.

Business Needs

Output Extender puts content into the hands of a wide range of users, quickly, conveniently, and securely.

Reports and other high-volume output, such as statements from enterprise applications, are typically distributed as printed documents.  But paper documents are more expensive, less secure, less accessible and harder to distribute than electronic versions.

OpenText Output Extender captures and transforms report and print stream, image, and PDF outputs and stores them in your secure managed central repository, where users can easily and securely access the information online from any location.  It helps you get rid of shelves full of paper documents and time-consuming, expensive, outdated printing and distribution processes. 

Moreover, Output Extender lowers IT costs significantly.  Analyst research shows that up to 50 percent of an organization’s help desk calls are print-related.  Output Extender further lowers costs by letting you reschedule archiving and other jobs to off-peak times, thereby smoothing out network traffic.

And in a time of growing digital empowerment, it gives your employees self-service access to the ERP and other mainframe application reports and output they need in their jobs.  When data is easier to access, people spend less time gathering information and more time analyzing it.

OpenText Output Extender assures that content is delivered to its intended destination, in the right format for the right device at the right time. It offers these benefits:

  • Lower costs of enterprise application report storage, retrieval, processing, and distribution
  • Easier bursting, bundling, and merging of reports, output and forms
  • Anytime, anywhere access to semi-structured content on any device, in static or interactive formats
  • Streamlined regulatory compliance through easier report retention, access, and auditability
  • Adherence to WCAG 2.0 Level AA accessibility guidelines for simplified regulatory compliance
  • Convenient single point of access to reports, independent of source applications and operating systems
  • Secure, customizable access to reports
  • Reduced IT overhead

Ensure easy access to key business content with OpenText Output Extender’s key capabilities:

  • Supports packaged enterprise applications including Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, SAP, Lawson, Microsoft Dynamics GP and AX, JD Edwards, legacy mainframe applications, and OpenText Communications Center Enterprise
  • Delivers reports in AFP, PCL, Metacode/DJDE, PostScript, line data, image, PDF, PDF/A and PDF/UA formats
  • Compatible with portal interfaces such as Microsoft SharePoint, SAP, and OpenText ECM Suite, OpenText Output Manager, eDOCS Edition, and major content repositories
  • Reduces the processing and network burden through cross-platform job scheduling
  • Printer clustering (pooling) and failover emulate the speed and power of a larger production printer without the risk of printer downtime
  • Report security ensured through access rights managed at the document and report level; content can also be split at the page level, redacted, or removed
  • Eliminates the time-consuming and error-prone task of extracting and re-keying data from reports through a handy report mining feature, which lets users find and repurpose data to create and share sub-reports, documents, and data feeds

Products

OpenText Output Extender

Output Extender supports an organization’s Enterprise Information Management strategy by capturing and routing print stream and report output from enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, document composition systems, mainframe applications and others, then transforming it into appropriate formats for the destination and consumer.

  • Extend your EIM strategy to include mainframe reports and output and other new sources of content
  • Consolidate and decommission disperse legacy repositories and reduce your mainframe MIPs fees
  • Cut the cost of storage, retrieval, processing, and distribution of reports and other output from enterprise applications
  • Off-load print spooling resource consumption from your SAP ERP system with SAP X-OMS certification
  • Support accessibility requirements to provide content in an accessible format to persons with disabilities
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Resource Center