Alex Smith |
Information technology consulting company CGI announced last year that it was integrating its OpenMedia newsroom solution suite with Microsoft Teams to streamline communications channels for journalists and producers.
According to Michael Pfitzner, vice president at CGI Deutschland, the integration is helping to address a desire by journalists to continue use Teams while creating a story.
“Sometimes, journalists just circumvent the whole process of using a newsroom platform and chat away on Teams instead,” says Pfitzner. “We decided to address that by integrating with Teams and allow news organisations to keep track of all the data.”
The OpenMedia newsroom solution suite can now create a chat within Teams and invite all of the people that are associated with a particular story, providing them with a single place to discuss it and exchange related information. A card with information about the story, such as the title, can also be shared.
“You can jump between the chat and the media for the story very easily,” says Pfitzner. “It allows Teams communication to happen, but in a controlled, managed way that can also be combined with OpenMedia communication. “
The OpenMedia Teams integration allows every journalist and producer involved in a story to communicate in a single Teams chat
CGI is currently conducting a proof of concept for the new integration with two of its customers in Europe, who have provided feedback to help develop the application further.
“Our customers wanted us to make sure that it was even more slim and secure, and about adjusting the access rights that our application needed,” says Pfitzner. “So far, everything that they wanted to see has been added to the application, and we will continue to discuss further extensions to the integration with them as they request it.”
CGI has worked closely with Microsoft throughout the development of the integration, and Pfitzner is positive about the partnership.
“There has always had a good partnership between Microsoft and CGI, but we have specifically had a very close cooperation and relationship with the media industry team,” he said. “This has allowed us to work closely with Microsoft on the development of the integration and solve problems very quickly. We’re delighted about how well we’ve worked with Microsoft here at IBC as well.”