Not saying that it will occur, just want to that things are moving towards a direction and not just forward. My ship changing course metaphor is more of what I derive during the rest of the conference and “explains” why there was no vision in the keynote.

The alternative, that there is no vision, is not a good one.

When I comes to services packs I tend to agree, Our last upgrade to D6.5 went rather seamless and I hope our upcoming upgrade (next week) to SP1 will go just fine.

I would have been concerned, perhaps a little miffed, if a bunch of new product announcements had been made. Releases have already slipped on products announced last year, so it’s good that they didn’t add to the mess. Personally, I need them to focus on improving what’s already out there and improving on release times.

Last thing: service packs. In the days of 4.x and prior to 5.3 SP4, I waited until I was absolutely sure the SP would work. It seemed like for every two bugs fixed, something else would break because of the fix. Since since SP5, I’ve noticed a huge quality improvement. They could always slip and go back to their old ways, but when 6.5 SP2 comes out, I expect to put it into production within a month or two.

To AL and PIE: I feel like I’m in Bizzaro World, because I left the conference feeling more down on CenterStage and a lot more positive on Web Publisher and MWS. Personally, I think CenterStage development is taking much, much too long and for my own personal needs, is going to lack some needed functionality in the first release. Conversely, the Interactive Products are really starting to take off and to me the most exciting news (which to most people is boring but has the largest implications) is the rebuilt Site Caching Services now known as IDS. That is a monumental improvement. (Oh, if you only knew the threading concurrency issues that I have in SCS…)

First, not all the user interfaces are built in FLEX, but there is a movement towards using it as a “standard”. To say that they are hardcoded, suggesting it is in”FLEX”able is a misnomer. I’ll agree that WDK is an unmanageable mess. That’s just my opinion. However, since the FLEX UI is based on leveraging DFS to handle all the content server talk, making your own FLEX based application would be fairly easy to do. If it is unmanageable, then that’s your fault for not knowing how to code properly. It’s a bit early though since officially only MWS is using FLEX as a released product, so let’s reserve judgement on that front. Besides, WDK is still going to be around for a bit longer and is going to be supported.

I do have a question about your XML statement that it “does not do much practical for a user”. If I’m the end user staring at a web page with a form on it, I could see your point. I’m not seeing any obvious XML code staring at me, it’s all behind the scenes so why should I care from the user stand-point? XML in all of it’s practical uses in various technologies is a fantasic format especially when trying to make a document more universal.

I completely agree with your statement on the underlying communication between the various products. I think most of that originates from EMC’s past buying sprees and how slow they have been to unify the product line. Part of it also has to do with changing technology and just plain not keeping up with everyone else. I’ve seen improvements in this area, but wish that progress was faster.

For my company, Documentum is not feasible as a WCM system. For some of my clients, it is feasible. It all depends on the complexity and scaling. EMC could do a better job of selling this and demonstrating this, but they will never beat the smaller, more flexible WCM systems, in a lot of environments.

Having said that I think the whole thing is just a matter of approach. We all know that there are now silver bullets for anything particular let alone the overall solution. Still from my Knowledge Management-perspective I like the ECM approach where all parts of our system can be integrated (and has been done somewhere on the planet already). That often means that individual pieces are more complicated and less aligned to supporting a particular need “best in the market”. I agree that Documentum has never been the coolest and most flexible way to deploy a CMS for a website or an intranet – its strenght has been in the architecture below. This is also seen in Gartner (and other) reports about WCM where there are other agile systems often written in PHP or other scripting languages that provide a fast way to set up your website. However, I think the WebPublsher product has been redesigned in a good way and is something different from a few years ago. Add the XML-architecture and Dynamic Delivery Services and the solutions is quite compelling I think.

So what EMC needs to do is be show how customers can leverage the Documentum platform to also to corporate intranets as well as other solutions represented by CenterStage, TaskSpace, MediaWorkSpace and other client technologies focused on supporting different use cases. I hope we can try IDSx/DDS in our upcoming project…I am happy to share our experiences from that…

The clients are not all based in FLEX. MediaWorkSpace, TaskSpace and WebPubliser is. Centerstage is based on ExtJS instead. In addition to that there are My Documentum for the Desktop (old FileSharing Services and MyDocumentum Off-line which I think are great complements to web-based clients. That also resembles what Alfresco has in terms of light-weight access to the repository through Windows Explorer/Mac Finder although the EMC one requires a small installer.

MediaWorkSpace will have it is own SDK called MediaWorkSpace Action Framework coming soon in CR and GA Q4 2009. That allows you to to pre- and post processing, extend MWS logic as well as add or change UI components in MWS. All of that is done on top of a service-oriented architecture where you have access to core Documentum Foundation Services (DFS) the one done for the default MWS called MWS Services and abiity to create your own services.

I realise that it does not support the same way of customisations as in WDK but going for “configure more – code less” isn’t that bad I think. CenterStage is designed the same way but there you have widgets to control which then also relies on services specific to the CenterStage while also utilising DFS. Customisations work the same in the BOF layer so all that power remains, To me this leads to growing set of services that you can either use to extend existing clients or rather easy crate new composite ones. Unless you have millions invested in WDK customisation this has be a good thing. On the other hand sooner or later all clients need a rewrite and more and more companies will see a need to go towards more moderna clients to increase productivity and to be able to attract younger people who expect nice RIA interfaces.

My feeling around D7 is the same as yous…that would have been nice to see in Q4. On the other hand I feel that from a number of products a number of good new features will be delivered through SP2 and SP3 which is in the same time frame as the orginal D7 schedule.

So I think that EMC is actually putting up more candy than anyone could have forseen when I went to my first EMC World in 2006.