Craig Randall recently posted how he was presenting on Building Content-Enabled Applications at EMC World, at least until he was downed by injury. Regardless of his injury, this is a topic of great interest to me and I had a few conversations over the past year with him on the topic. I wanted to chime in on his post to both amplify it and see if we can get some dialog going in advance of the conference.
Month: April 2009
Requirements, Worth the Read
Over the years, I’ve read, written, reviewed, and otherwise made use of a large variety of Requirements documents. Many were exercises in typing, some were a bare minimum to meet a checkbox, and others were useful tools. The latter ones are invaluable, and the others should be so, but aren’t due to process-heavy development cycles or teams just trying to “deliver the mail”.
Regardless of the type of Requirements document provided, it is important to not only understand the requirements, but to know how they might impact each other. Some of this requires experience, the rest just requires a little time.
I present three, out of many, situations that could have been avoided if a little attention had been applied to understanding the requirements.
Curse of the Old Requirement
My Bucket Item
I’m feeling a bit reflective. This tends to happen when I work a lot and then I am suddenly forced to stop. Tonight my brain has taken me to the concept of what would I really like to do before I kick the bucket. This isn’t a list of 10 things, but the one thing I would most like to do in the future that I haven’t done yet. It also isn’t a regret issue as I can still do all of things things I considered…
Hitting the Trail
SourceOne, EMC’s Worst Guarded Secret Arrives
For months, upon months, I’ve been hearing about SourceOne. Multiple friends at EMC occasionally let the name drop, while others would talk about something coming up and I would say, You mean SourceOne? I eventually learned what it was, but I had to be quiet. I told some clients, soon EMC will have an nice eDiscovery option for you, but in the meantime, these are your choices.
When I was up at AIIM, they made the announcement, held a fancy webcast or two, and posted material for all to see. Was it worth the wait?
What the Heck is SourceOne?
The Challenge of CMIS
I started this to talk about some of the things out there, but there is sooo much that I am drawing the line. Kas is writing some good things on CMIS as he attempts to grok it. Others, like Jon Marks, are grappling with CMIS as well. They raise some excellent points that probably deserve posts unto themselves. I find myself, today, focusing on the more immediate and of the more “outside-the-box” thoughts.
Updates and Announcements
10 Things About Pie
Well, Kas Thomas stealth-tagged me with the 10-things meme. I did this just over a year ago, but I thought I would go ahead and reply with 10 things about me that aren’t ECM related. I wrote all ten of these without referring to my last list. The scary part, the last item is exactly the same.
- Dude! My father was career U.S. Navy and I spent most of my youth in Virginia Beach. I refer to people by “Dude” on a regular basis. If you hear me use that term, then you know I am out of “work mode” and pretty relaxed.
- War Eagle! I went to Auburn University down in Alabama. To say I am a rabid fan of the football, American, team is like saying the Sahara is going through a drought.
- Check. I love to play chess. I’m only okay. I can beat all but of my friends regularly (and he lives 700+ miles away). In the wider world of chess, I am, at best, adequate.
- Don’t touch that dial! While I was at Auburn, the Golden Eagle, Tiger, stayed in my apartment for one week until the management found out. She would watch the television and my roommate tilted the TV so she could see better.
- What’s in a name? The name Pie has nothing to do with food or the mathematical number pi. More I cannot say.
- Gooooaaallll!!! I watched every match of the 1994 World Cup. Keep in mind that I was taking a full slate of classes in college, had no VCR, and was living in Alabama at the time. Since then, aside from the one in Korea, I’ve seen a vast majority of matches in each World Cup.
- Play Ball!!! I love baseball. My favorite team is the Atlanta Braves and my favorite players are Dale Murphy, Hank Aaron, Lou Gehrig, and Tom Glavine.
- I am married with two boys. I want nothing more for them to be happy with their lives. Oh, and one of them going to Auburn would be pretty darn cool.
- I am intent on seeing the best 50 movies of all time. As nobody can agree, I have a list of 280+ movies, of which I have seen 89% and counting.
- When I grow up, I want to be a history professor.
I’m going to follow Kas’s lead and not directly tag people. I am going to hope to see Johnny and Lee add to this. I would have mentioned Jed, Jesse, Craig, Bex, or Billy, but as you can see, they have already gone through this particular exercise and given good answers.
Enjoy. My next post won’t be so list oriented. At least I can’t think why it would.
EMC World Orlando, 2009 Edition
Well, I finally broke down and registered for EMC World. This year it is May 18-22 in Orlando. I got my hotel reservations months ago and wasn’t in a rush for the actual registration as the price has yet to change. I don’t need a free gift for registering early. In this economy, it is all about the Benjamins and the impact on the balance sheet, so no discount, no early registration push.
I was thinking about talking about my plans for EMC World, which looks pretty good, but the I realized something…This will be my 10th Documentum User Conference! So I have decided to flash back a bit to the previous conferences.
Upcoming CMIS Webinar
Just wanted to take a quick break to let everyone know that I will be speaking on Alfresco’s webinar on CMIS this Thursday, April 9th, at Noon EDT. Unleashing CMIS: From Federated Search to Developer Tools gives an introduction to CMIS, including some history, and then dives into the creation of the AIIM iECM Committee’s CMIS Demo. I’ll be talking about the entire process and then showing a brief demo of the actual application. At the end there will be a Question and Answer session.
So if you missed the talk at AIIM, or are just late coming to the CMIS party, come along and see the first multi-vendor CMIS implementation.
Register here.
How CMIS Made Me Re-Visit Visual Studio
By now, if you are a regular reader, you know that I worked on the AIIM iECM Committee’s CMIS Demo for the AIIM 2009 Conference, Info360. If you read my initial write-up on the effort, you saw that we built the thing using .NET. Specifically, ASP.NET for the UI and I wrote C# for the guts of the search federator. The question you may be asking is why did Pie choose to use Visual Studio 2008 when he has been living in the Java world of Documentum and open source for so incredibly long?
Well, the decision to use .NET was based on simple math. A free, reliable, IIS Server to host an application is better than paying for a server to host a LAMP stack. The other thing you may not realize is that I used to be a certifiable Microsoft developer, or is that certified? No matter…let me explain.
My Annual Day of Celebration
Baseball’s Opening Day has historically been a day where I take off and watch the slate of games at a local bar with friends. This year, it falls on April 6th.
I want to mention this to everyone because this is one of the reasons I work hard. I like to do things with my family, and I like to enjoy my favorite, finer or not, things in life. For me, few days during the year match Opening Day. It is the one day of the year where people from all cross-sections of my life get together and enjoy one of my favorite things, Baseball.
Remember, no matter how hard you work, or what you do, always take time to relax with friends and family. This is why I do what I do.
So if you wander into a certain sports bar tomorrow and see somebody wearing a baseball jersey watching the game, don’t make any assumptions. Just take a moment to think about what things that you are able to enjoy because of what you do for a living.
Now, Play Ball!!!
Word of Pie 