Comments on: Sailing with EMC’s Magellan

By: Pie

Pie — Fri, 30 May 2008 23:57:12 +0000

One thing that I forgot to mention….They are going to try and have Magellan work with both D6 and D6.5. This is a goal, not a promise. They will sacrifice D6 compatibility in order to get it to deliver on its promise.

By: eRoom eXpert

eRoom eXpert — Thu, 29 May 2008 17:19:10 +0000

Sorry Laurence. I knew your name was Laurence, but was just looking at the presentation by Mark Lewis and had ‘Mark’ on the brain. Sorry about that!

I think it is pretty exciting to see a product like Magellan that could be a one stop shopping source rather than having to log into WebTop, TaskSpace and eRoom to conduct business.
Love your blog. Keep it up!

By: Pie

Pie — Thu, 29 May 2008 16:55:15 +0000

Thanks for chiming in. In theory, we’ll have everything in the Content Server, Project Plans included, by D7 in 2009. That may change of course, but we can hope. Still some leeway with eRoom support going until 2011.

Oh, and the name is Pie, or Laurence. I know not this Mark person of whom you speak.

By: eRoom eXpert

eRoom eXpert — Thu, 29 May 2008 15:48:32 +0000

Building a migration tool is not all that difficult. As you mentioned, the most difficult will be the databases. Remember that almost everything in eRoom can be nested and hopefully they will continue that in Magellan. So, a datase row may contain another database. A row in that database may contain a calendar. A calendar entry in that calendar may contain another database. You get the gist.

There are companies that have created migration tools to migrate from eRoom to SharePoint. We are actually working on a tool to migrate from SharePoint to eRoom (arguably much easier since SharePoint does not nest items). You can build tools to crawl through an eRoom site and catalog all items in hierarchy, export attachments, create xml representations of items and attributes, etc. Many people can currently export eRoom now. Pumping all of that into Magellan will be the fun part. Building the business rules for each item type, column type in databases, and the various attributes and permissions(ACLs) will take some time, but clearly defined.

One of the really cool things I like about Magellan is the ability to kick off and interact with workflows from the BPM suite. This will be major, and hopefully they will be working with the TaskSpace folks. In the past, if you wanted to create workflows in eRoom, you had to write custom commands and core events in order to do so…. not impossible, but time consuming. Magellan seems to recognize the importance of workflow. Yeah!

I see current eRoom users remaining with eRoom 7 through 2011 due to the fact that Magellan will not have Project Plans initially. Some anxious customers may dual track and have both eRoom and Magellan (EMC will need to figure out how to handle licensing for that scenario, especially if they want to promote Magellan to organizations who MUST have project plans). BUT, I do see quite a few organizations who have not ventured into eRoom before jumping on that Magellan bandwagon.

Great post Mark! Great EMC World last week too. Looking forward to Orlando next year.

By: Pie

Pie — Thu, 29 May 2008 04:00:11 +0000

If Crown takes Bulldoser and creates a version specifically for this, I think it would do quite well. The eRoom databases are not straightforward and will take some work to convert. None of the tools can handle them now without customizations. The plus side is that all of the same constructs will exist in the Content Server, making it a specific mapping exercise.

If Crown pulls it off, they are gold just from the people that will knock on their doors for deployments. They will be highly motivated to make this work, and I’m sure that they will have EMC engineers to answer their questions.

The migration could still be screwed-up. I won’t be the first to try it. Right now, I have to look at the commitment and have hope.

By: ldallas

ldallas — Thu, 29 May 2008 03:47:56 +0000

You make an excellent point in drawing attention to EMC’s willingness to convert licenses. It is not an unprecedented move on their part. They were known to convert undeployed iTeam seats to eRoom back in the day. Rolling eRoom seats to the new product is more than a little ironic and implies a great deal about their aspirations for the new product as well as the future of the current one.

As to the migration, I am less optimistic. Mapping user managed collaboration taxonomies, custom tables, basic workflows et.al. is potentially a very complex exercise.

The first step is always admitting you have a problem and to be honest, seeing EMC do that openly in this area is refreshing. I am concerned that wildly unrealistic expectations will be set for customers by sales when they point to this line on the Enterprise License and naively say – this product will take care of it all. Still, you gotta start somewhere and Bulldozer is as good a place as any. (although OpenMigrate and VitalPath might also be good alternatives)