With a focus on seamless sharing across domains, OpenText Documentum for Life Sciences 16.4 takes a giant leap forward

When major acquisitions happen, market analysts, competitors, customers, and employees alike are watching closely to determine what’s next. In fact, employees like me were not…

Robin Gellerman profile picture

Robin Gellerman

July 3, 20185 minutes read

When major acquisitions happen, market analysts, competitors, customers, and employees alike are watching closely to determine what’s next.

In fact, employees like me were not terribly nervous when OpenText™ – a long-standing leader in enterprise content management – acquired Dell EMC’s Enterprise Content Division in January 2017. In fact, we assured our customers that OpenText would come through with flying colors. Now, with the release of OpenText™ Documentum 16.4, which extends to our industry-specific offerings for Life Sciences, that confidence has been confirmed.

Documentum for Life Sciences 16.4 represents the investment OpenText has made in Documentum and the Life Sciences industry since the acquisition. We’ve made a strong effort to raise our game with this update, adding more new features and delivering more value than planned before the acquisitions.

Let me first share a few highlights. This latest release improves upon the solution in four key ways:

  • Smoothing out the unification of processes by enabling seamless information sharing across domains and external partners
  • Supporting the management, tracking, and reconciling of printed documentation to reflect new data integrity guidance
  • Providing a dynamic security framework to manage content access that matches changing business needs
  • Packaging ICH-compliant rendering, annotations, and reporting for singular accountability from OpenText

That’s a lot of efficiency gains packed into four bullet points. And efficiency is the most important aspect, because in Life Sciences today, there is more pressure than ever to increase productivity, which ultimately results in accelerating time to market.

Seamless information sharing across domains

This advantage is nothing new for OpenText; in fact, Documentum has been helping Life Sciences organizations improve their efficiency for some time. What is new, then? An even more sophisticated architecture with mapping of metadata for live linkage of documentation across domains. Because of the way Documentum for Life Sciences solution suite is architected, all suites in the solution interoperate – a single shared source for accurate, current regulated content.

This is an enormous step forward. Now, instead of exporting digital document sets from one domain to the other, just to share them, and reimport to the next, the processes are unified. Clinical documents that must be included in regu­latory submissions are linked to both clinical and regulatory stakeholders. Similarly, relationships are created between quality and regulatory documentation to cover the full product lifecycle. As your product progresses through clinical trial toward commercialization, role-based access enables stakeholders to easily locate the most recent copy to comply with regulations.

In the quality and manufacturing domain, the content set typically includes specifications that carefully establish parameters for drug efficacy and suitability for intended use, testing criteria, process validation, and reports related to investigation, audit, and training. With Documentum for Life Sciences, you can ensure consistency and maintain control over these documents from the moment they are created or enter the content management system. There is much less likelihood that research and development (R&D) data will be misinterpreted, production context left out, or past improvements undocumented.

The overall result? Your organization can make great strides in overcoming the challenge of ensuring completeness, accuracy, and control in accordance with each phase of the drug lifecycle. You can let go of sharing documents the old way and adopt a single shared repository.

Management, tracking, and reconciliation of printed documentation and batch records

Documentum for Life Sciences 16.4 helps you meet new regulatory guidelines with full management, tracking, and reconciliation of printed documentation and batch records. This ensures data integrity and compliance with cGMP found in EMA and FDA guidance for the industry. There are configurable options to allow print restrictions based on status and document type, where each print and reprint will obtain a unique issued print number including electronic signatures to approve and reconcile items.

Restricted content access with dynamic security

The latest version of Documentum for Life Sciences encompasses dynamic security controls to restrict content access to a set of users in accordance with changing business needs. For example:

  • M&A activities may require temporary protection of acquired assets including product-related documentation.
  • Content for products developed with controlled / toxic substances need to be protected.
  • Clinical trials require content-blinding for the whole study or subsets of documents.
  • Financially sensitive or confidential documents must be restricted.
  • Safety information might require temporary or permanent protection.

With the updated dynamic security framework, out-of-the-box Documentum for Life Sciences provides an open model that can easily be modified to fit your business needs. New access rules can be configured by authorized users and business administrators without IT assistance – another efficiency gain.

Complete accountability from OpenText

Documentum for Life Sciences solutions are built on content management and relied on the third-party technology for ancillary, yet necessary functionality such as annotations, rendering, and reporting. Taking advantage of OpenText’s vast portfolio, Documentum for Life Sciences 16.4 natively integrates with market-leading products to deliver ICH-compliant rendering, annotations, and reporting. As a single vendor, you can count on OpenText to deliver a complete solution with full accountability from end to end.

A major update to reduce total cost of ownership and boost productivity

Nearly every component in this new release has been updated. New tools and options simplify and reduce development and administration costs. Productivity tools help users to be more efficient in working with Documentum and stored content. enable users to access content and participate in associated workflows. Added integrations offer new capabilities to take advantage of OpenText technologies.

Come to Enterprise World to see it for yourself, and register for the OpenText Live webcast to learn more.

Share this post

Share this post to x. Share to linkedin. Mail to
Robin Gellerman avatar image

Robin Gellerman

Robin Gellerman is the Product Marketing Manager for Life Sciences Enterprise Content Management solutions at OpenText. With over 20 years in the enterprise content management industry, Robin has held a variety of product and industry marketing positions supporting document management, capture and customer communications technologies at OpenText, the Enterprise Content Division of EMC, Captiva and Document Sciences. Most recently, Robin was the Industry Strategist for retail, and has previously worked with energy & engineering and healthcare solutions.

See all posts

More from the author

Top information management trends for life sciences in 2024

Top information management trends for life sciences in 2024

The life sciences industry has seen monumental change over the past few years. From the Covid-19 pandemic to a spike in investment, coupled with rising…

November 30, 2023 5 minutes read
Assembling the pieces: Archiving and retention in Life Sciences

Assembling the pieces: Archiving and retention in Life Sciences

In the world of pharmaceuticals, something interesting keeps happening—companies acquire, merge, or divest from other companies. It’s like a puzzle they’re trying to solve getting…

September 21, 2023 4 minutes read
What’s new in OpenText Life Sciences solutions

What’s new in OpenText Life Sciences solutions

Life Sciences organizations are finding new ways to work within distributed and hybrid work processes adopted during the pandemic that remains in place today. Mastering…

February 16, 2023 12 minutes read

Stay in the loop!

Get our most popular content delivered monthly to your inbox.