Month: March 2009

How the iECM CMIS Demo for the AIIM Conference was Made

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Okay, that title should handle all of the words I need for lots of hits.  🙂  In all seriousness, that title is exactly what I am focusing on in this post.  I’m going to cover some of the background and non-technical challenges in putting this demonstration together so that you can better appreciate what went into the effort. You can read the official announcement for the official description.

Before I do that, I want to offer thanks to the following:

  • Thomas Pole: Thomas is the chair of the iECM committee for AIIM. He was in charge of this demo and was able to identify a host platform for us to run the system on for no charge.  In addition, he built the User Interface while I focused on the back-end components.
  • Betsy Fanning: Betsy is the Director of Standards at AIIM.  She helped keep us on track and coordinated with the various vendors that participated in this effort.
  • The iECM Committee: They helped make sure that what we were doing made sense from a business perspective and worked with us to develop the requirements and design.
  • The Vendors: This is more than the obvious ones. I’ll go into more details in a subsequent post. I just want to say now that all the vendors involved worked hard in this effort. Just because you don’t see their content right now doesn’t mean that they didn’t participate.
  • Harris Corporation and Washington Consulting, Inc.: Thomas’s and my companies, respectively, helped us by allowing us time and additional resources to build and put our pieces together. We both have full-time day jobs and only support from our companies made this possible.

Okay, on to the show…

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Documentum and the Search for Search

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Those of you that follow Documentum’s products know that search has been a bug-a-boo the last few years. When 5.3 was rolled-out, there was much promised around faster search.  It is here, but at a price.  Additional hardware is needed and the version of FAST used by Documentum isn’t VMWare safe. To be fair, dedicating a server to search is part of the reason we have better performance, but it hasn’t been the panacea that we wanted.

In 7.0, we are looking at the prospect of Lucene support for the more plug-and-play repositories, while the larger ones will still be able to leverage a larger, multi-node, FAST installation. (Works great! Seriously, I mean it.)  This is fine, but supporting two search engines, neither of which you actually own, is an issue for any vendor.

So what is the solution? Last week I read an article speculating on the prospect of EMC looking for a search company to add to their portfolio. Now the article was pure speculation, but that is what makes it fun.  Let’s see if it makes sense and who could EMC acquire.

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Should CMIS Impact Purchasing Now?

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I was reading a post by Janus Boye with the provocative premise that customers shouldn’t worry about CMIS. As you can imagine, I was shocked.  When I read the post, I saw that he had some valid points, but that his conclusion was only about half-right. As I started writing my response, I realized I was writing something entirely too long, so I brought it here.

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My Journey from DocApp to DAR

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A year ago, I tried Composer when my first project began to upgrade to D6. Without going into too much detail, it sucked. I loaded my DocApp and Composer completely rejected it.  After a couple of days, I gave up. If I had been creating a new application, maybe it would have been fine, but I wasn’t. After talking to David Louie, I sent the DocApp in question to EMC and got the report, “it works in the new version”. Well, it was too late and I wasn’t changing my developer’s environment mid-process.

Now that project is progressing down the D6.5 path. I thought I would try again, and document the process for everyone.

I’m writing this post “live”.  Which means I won’t post it live, but I won’t edit the post to disguise steps and my thoughts as I try things.

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Update on the AIIM CMIS Demo

At the end of January, I talked about the proposed effort being undertaken by the iECM committee to create a CMIS demonstration for the AIIM Expo. Things are going well and I am working with others to build the demonstration. I wanted to share a few details with you.

  • We are implementing the Web Service binding for CMIS. While REST would be better for what we are doing, it was felt that the Web Services binding would be easier for the development team to churn out.
  • As a result of that, the participating vendors are Alfresco, EMC, IBM, and Nuxeo. Microsoft wanted to participate was not sure that their Web Services binding would be complete in time.
  • Each vendor will have a two issues worth of articles from AIIM’s bi-monthly publication, Infonomics.  In addition, each vendor is welcome to add their own white papers and collateral to the system.
  • Users will search on metadata and/or full text. All searches will be round-robin sorted so that each repository has multiple hits on the first page, assuming that they have any content that meets the criteria.
  • The system is being developed in .NET because we were able to identify a free hosting server that could support the effort.
  • We, including myself, are going to be at the Expo on April 2nd to talk about it. I’ll share the exact time when I have it.

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The Importance of, and Lack of, Good Technical Support

So I have left my current post on Composer half written because I am frustrated and angry. Probably not the best time to write a post, but I want to share while I am motivated. The problem, tech support.

I only get involved in support cases these days if:

  • It is a complex issue that requires someone with deep knowledge to resolve. These that only applies to Documentum issues these days as there are better technical resources for everything else. I enjoy these cases because I learn something and they are a nice challenge.
  • An issue is languishing and no resolution is being reached. I hate these issues because it means that their has been a communication breakdown somewhere along the line and fixing it is never fun.

Before I dive in, I just want to say that I have dealt with many vendor support organizations over my career.  Except when I was in pure evaluation mode of a product, my experiences have been consistently poor on average.  Some good, some bad, but no large vendor has ever been consistently good.

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Pie Joins the Twitterati

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For those of you that have been paying attention, you already know that I created a Twitter account at the end of January.  I have some friends that have been pestering me to get on-board and check it out for a while. I always demurred, thinking it was micro-blogging and that since I had a blog, I didn’t need to invest the time.

Boy, did I blow that one.

After about a month of experimentation, I’m ready to report my thoughts, experiences, and urge all of you to join the discussion.

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