Before moving forward, I want to clarify. I was not slighting SharePoint. If anything, it was a recognition of what SharePoint has achieved as a legitimate Content Management system.

Let’s now take a step back and look at keeping Content alive.

The Tools

I learned years ago that no one tool is right for every job. While this is true in the Content Management space, for many challenges, multiple tools could be effective. What usually defines “success” is the planning and governance involved.

Let’s face it, SharePoint is generating a lot of document graveyards because it is being deployed a lot. It isn’t a weakness of SharePoint. It is the same weakness that existed before SharePoint when organizations threw Content Management solutions over the wall and expected them to stick.

If there aren’t already, there will soon be graveyards built upon Box. It is a sign of success of the platform and a sign of failure by Information Professionals.

Granting Life to Content

Gabor Fari (who should write a post on this topic) and Billy both say that a strong collaborative system, properly designed and implemented, can give Content life. I think Billy puts it best when he says that Content should be exhibited.

I think that this type of system where Content is developed and readily revisited and leveraged is great.

It just isn’t the only way.

A well designed Case Management can give life to Content. Why? Let me give an example…

Let’s say I’m performing Correspondence Management. A piece of correspondence comes in and I have the responsibility to respond. I should be able to quickly locate other items on the same topic or from the same person. I can look at the previous responses and craft the new response appropriately. Meanwhile, metrics can be run to identify trends and see what is happening.

All About Context

What both examples have in common is that the Context of the Content is providing the value. Whether that Context is provided collaboratively or through using proper use of processes, that is the value. The sum of the information around that Content and its Context is the value.

No tool will give that to you. Only a well thought-out design, implementation, and proper governance will give it to you. Sure, some tools will fit some business problems better than others, but the tool cannot provide Context. That is up to the people using the system.

Is it frustrating that there are a lot of document graveyards? Yes, without question. Does it mean that my career has been wasted? Absolutely not. I’ve created many systems that aren’t graveyards and I’m proud of those systems. There are also a couple graveyards that I had a hand in building.

The existence of these graveyards existing universally should be a wake-up call. We as Information Professionals should strive to eliminate them. If you are reading this, it is your responsibility. These systems should not be dumping grounds. If people can’t find what they need or decided it isn’t worth looking, then why store the Content at all?

That is the real question. If nobody accesses the Content because it is buried, why not just kill it once and for all?

I’m not going to bore you with all the details on how the exam was prepared by outside experts or any of that. While important, that isn’t a true measure. I think the true measure is the opinions of the battle-scarred veterans of the Information wars. Being one, I offer my opinion here to start building a consensus.

The “Preparation”

I’m telling you right now, my approach should not be replicated by anyone who actually wants to pass the first time. I went in cold. No studying on the AIIM website, and there is plenty to study. All I did was sign-up, look at the topics covered, and take the exam.

The reason was that I wanted to see how it measured my experience as an information professional. I was pretty confident that if I studied that I would pass. What I wouldn’t learn is how much I know because of my experience and how much of the score was due to studying. I was trying to measure the exam, not just pass.

Looking at the topics was both a blessing and a curse. It was good to look at them and think on what I knew about each topic and how it was all inter-related. It was bad because I looked at some topics and knew that while familiar with the topic, I just knew high-level information.

Another thing I noticed is that the exam isn’t a percentage score. Like a section of the SATs, the top score is 800. Unlike the SATs, there is a minimum score to pass, 560 in this case. This leaves me with no way to even begin to gauge how I am doing on the exam.

Which is good and bad.

The Exam

As I sat down for the exam, it was all very confortable. I’ve taken many certs (the Microsoft Solution Developer has consumed most of my exam money) in the past and the whole process was familiar. I then started the exam and was immediately concerned.

Some questions had one answer. Some had multiple. While it was very clear how many items I had to select, it made determining how I was doing impossible. I quickly guessed, maybe incorrectly, that you could get partial credit for the questions with multiple answers.

It also meant that selecting the correct answer as a whole was that much harder. There were many questions where one was obvious but the others seemed uncertain.

This basically ruined any possible enjoyment from the exam. I would hit a series of questions where I wouldn’t feel confident and then I would get a Content Management or eDiscovery question to pick up my spirits. Of course a quick question on Master Data Management would squash that burst of enthusiasm.

By the time I finished the 100 questions, I had no idea how I had done. There were 2-3 questions that were outright guesses and there were a large number that had been carefully answered with logic because I didn’t definitively know.

I figured I had broken 500 and definitely not gotten an 800, but anything beyond that was open to speculation. As 560 was needed for passing, I was a tad nervous when I hit the button to conclude the exam.

The Result

Obviously I passed. I said so yesterday and you can bet your bottom dollar that I wouldn’t be talking about it if I hadn’t passed. While I’m not going to share my score, I will say that I didn’t squeak by with a sub-600 score. I figure that once you get above 600 that the luck factor is pretty much gone and that there is some knowledge guiding your selections.

This exam, even though I passed, was hard. There were a lot of terms, concepts, and best practices that while I use in practice, I don’t always use the same semantics.

The “easy” questions were the ones in domains that I had the most experience. As easy as those questions were to me, I know that there are people who will take this exam who will think the questions I considered easy to be hard. This should also work in reverse.

It is this realization that makes me think that the exam has real validity. If all the questions were hard and vague, or there were randomly dispersed easy questions, that would be a concern. The challenges I had were exactly the ones I expected to have when I entered.

The Certification

What does this mean? It means I’m a Certified Information Professional of course.

Seriously though, I’ll tell you right now that if I meet another one, I know that either they did a LOT of studying or have a lot of battle scars. Likely both. Just studying will be hard if you don’t have experience. The topics are so broad that covering each in enough detail to be sure you will pass will be a challenge.

Is the exam perfect? No, but no exams are perfect. It is a version 1.0 as well. The exam does meet its purpose though. The the exam will evolve over time as the role of the Information Professional evolves and our codification of the body of knowledge continues.

The thing that I think gives this certification real legs is the Continuing Education component. Taking another page from the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification, to maintain your status, you have to keep learning. You have the option to just retake the exam every three years, but continuing education is both cheaper and easier on your blood pressure.

This means that in four years, if I am still certified, you will know that I have at least been active in the space, continuing my education.

The Summary

It really comes down to this. Would I give preferential consideration to someone with their CIP versus someone without it? If it is for a non-developer role, definitely. Would I require it? In a few years, after the certification has been disseminated, I will absolutely require it of my Project Managers, Functional Leads, and Architects.

I will also start telling people now that if they want to move from the tactical/technical roles to the positions that are involved in the strategic and design decisions, then preparing for the CIP will help them begin that journey.

[Edit: Read Kevin Parker’s thoughts on his becoming a CIP from November. Patrick Cunningham took the CIP cold and reviewed the exam like I did when it first came out as well.]

The first thing I want to say is that working for AIIM is not the reason I took the exam. My original goal had been to listen to feedback from others before I took the exam. It was always in my 2012 plans. Joining AIIM just moved me from the laggard position to that of the evaluator.

After all, if I was going to be the lead Information Professional at AIIM I should at least check out the certification sooner rather than later.

The Big Gap

Last year I was working on an effort to define certification paths within the Technology Solutions side of my old company, Washington Consulting, Inc. There were lots of technical certifications for developers and those specializing in products like Documentum and SharePoint. There were also good certifications for project managers and business analysts.

What was missing was a way for an Information Professional to demonstrate mastery of their craft in a way that could be marketed. That is how you get people to hire you in consulting. You market yourself to look like a better value than the competition.

The reason that I felt the gap so keenly was that I had no certification that was applicable. I could keep taking Documentum certifications until the end of time, but that didn’t really reflect what I did anymore. I was consulting on strategy and how Content Management should be effectively deployed as part of the bigger picture. I was advising people on how to effectively use SharePoint, the cloud, and records management. Managing large amount of data had become the norm and not the exception.

A technology-specific certification just no longer cut it for my career path or the paths of several of my colleagues.

Being an Information Professional

I have talked in the past about the need for us as Information professionals to evolve what we do so that it is looked upon as a mature profession. While I can’t find the post (I swear it was out there somewhere), it was in the context of discussing standards. Having standards, like CMIS, in our field is one way to show that we understand our field enough to call it a profession.

Another item is having an agreed upon body of knowledge that can be tested against. When you look at Information Management, it seems like it could be tough to nail down. If you look at it closer, the problem is no different than the one that faced project managers a few decades ago.

Project managers solved the problem by creating the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification. Today, possession of a PMP is required by many large organizations for their internal project managers and the consultants that they hire.

So when AIIM released the CIP exam this past fall, I was extremely curious but wasn’t about to recommend it to anyone until I had been able to judge the exam. I just didn’t have the time or business reason to take the exam. That said, I see it as potentially addressing the gap for us Information Professionals.

While I wasn’t sure, and am still not, if there was sufficient training out there to handle the entire breadth of the exam, the certification didn’t come out of a void. AIIM has been developing and delivering training programs for years on most of the areas tested. To be honest, if you are battle-scarred like me, you shouldn’t need a lot of training to pass any exam.

More on that when I talk about the exam itself.

Of course, easy or not, I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t believed in the cause. SOPA and similar bills, both in the past and future, threaten creativity and, more importantly, grant a little too much power to “Big Brother”.

Rather than explain it all to you myself, listen to Clay Shirky on the topic:

That pretty much sums up most of what you need to know, but there is more. [Ed Note: Almost immediately after hitting publish, Clay published a great post about not underestimating Hollywood]

Consider this…

A few years ago, I found a person blatantly copying my posts, and those of fellow Content Management bloggers, and marketing it as their own. I was upset. I wanted to take action. The only action I could realistically take, outside of complaining, was bring attention to it. I did so and it eventually stopped.

I felt violated. With SOPA I could have brought a charge and the site could have been shut down and removed. The legal authorities likely would have ignored me. Now imagine if I worked for a large company with lots of money, like Universal Studios. I’d get a lot of benefit of the doubt.

The thing is, we are all pirates and all copyright holders. Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research  wrote a brilliant article on the topic yesterday. It clearly shows how we are all, on some level, hypocrites. We don’t like anti-piracy rules until they impact us.

If you think that you don’t have a bone in this fight, you have to read Josh’s article.

We have two choices, we stifle all sharing and the ability to build upon those items or we watch our personal creations get used beyond our control.

The thing is, no matter what side you come down on, the “real pirates” stealing that original HBO special that aired last night will still continue. Legislation can never keep up with technology, at least not since the early 1900s.

Maybe we should work on teaching ethics and the concept fair use to everyone. If we have a strong moral compass as a society, this ceases to be enough of a problem to matter.

A.Rennie “Content at rest = cost, content in motion = value”, “Sharepoint is today’s document coffin”. Social ->relevancy, currency

The tweet was read by Gabor Fari who took immediate dislike to the tweet. Two facts that are important to know before proceeding. Gabor works for Microsoft and while I have worked with all major versions of SharePoint, most of my experience is with platforms that were mature when SharePoint was first released.

I’m going to recount some points of the discussion and expound now that I’m not limited by 140 characters. If you want to see the tweets, check both his and my tweets from Jan 16.

Proliferation of Document Graveyards

Gabor was quick to point out that Documentum is more of a document graveyard than SharePoint. I would argue that the number of Documentum and SharePoint document graveyards created since 2003 are fairly equivalent. SharePoint likely has more, but that is more due to the significantly higher number of SharePoint systems deployed since then.

It is more than technology at play here. It is IT generally just dumping content into a system a expecting people to just behave differently. Many just created a new way of access the traditional share drive.

Essentially, you could rewrite the tweet with almost any legacy Content Management system listed. Of course, SharePoint being the largest, or at least the fastest growing over the past several years, that is the one used. SharePoint has the target on their back.

The real point is that it is important to use your content in processes and collaboratively. If you just store it away, it is a cost, not an asset. This is true regardless of the systems in play.

Collaboration as the Foundation

Gabor then said something that I felt was immensely misleading:

Legacy #ECM was not built for collaboration from the ground up, but added as an afterthought.

I agree with this statement. However, I’m pretty sure Gabor isn’t including SharePoint in this categorization. With all due respect, SharePoint’s roots are in basic document sharing. Yes, their first interface was written ten years ago as opposed to 20, but it was still basic document sharing, just like FileNet, Documentum, and Open Text.

SharePoint is actually one of the “legacy” Content Management systems. It may be one of the newest/last ones to fit into that category, but it is there. It lives onsite and it’s initial use cases were the same as most major Content Management systems.

Yes, SharePoint 2010 is much more evolved than the original product, but all Content Management products are. The difference is that SharePoint has been trying to be more Information/Collaboration focused while many of the other legacy vendors have turned to Case Management.

Of course, none of that matters if they aren’t deployed correctly with a strong eye towards Change Management. That truth applies to all Content Management systems.

Final Note Regarding Silverlight

Meanwhile, CMS Wire published an article today asking if SharePoint and Silverlight have a Future. I think the key item in the article is the future of Silverlight. It is theoretically in the last release. Currently, it is believed that HTML 5 is the next thing for SharePoint.

Of course, this had mixed reactions when I share it. For the record, I wasn’t attacking SharePoint.

Personally, I strongly dislike building any user interface using a technology that requires a plugin like Flash or Silverlight. That significantly hurts cross-platform mobility and the ability for changes. Flash is slowly being replaced and I suspect that Microsoft will do the same with Silverlight. After all, it isn’t as if a competitor is going to providing HTML 5. It is a standard.

Oh sure, Silverlight is going to be around for a while, especially during SharePoint 2010’s tenure. I just expect to be talking about SharePoint years after Silverlight has gone the way of floppy disks.

Now that you’ve read the answer to the open-ended question from a week ago, what else is there to tell you? How about the story behind my move to AIIM and a little about what I see happening in my future?

Back in Time

Five years ago, I made a fairly gutsy statement while interviewing with Washington Consulting, Inc., my last company. I told the person interviewing me that my next job was going to be a Chief Information Officer position. Now normally you don’t tell an interviewer that you are thinking about your next position already, but as you may have gathered, I prefer to just tell it like it is.

Flash forward five years to when I learned that Cheryl McKinnon was coming to town for some meetings. We arranged to catch-up over drinks one evening during her trip. Coincidently, Cheryl interviewed with AIIM and they talked about their struggles managing their information and finding a person to drive them towards solutions.

That’s when Cheryl did something even more brilliant than normal, she suggested me. She then broached the idea with me over drinks. I was intrigued. From there, it was a matter of making sure that everyone had the same vision of how AIIM should manage their Information Assets in the future.

We did and here we are.

What That Means

AIIM is not unlike many organizations. Multiple systems need to work together to serve the goals set forth by leadership. There are different groups that all have valid and important needs that have to share central resources.

More importantly, AIIM is going to focus on better managing its information to better serve its members. If you are reading this that is you or at least should be.

While AIIM may be small in employees, it makes up for it in membership. I will be helping AIIM to help you. Since I am still an Information Professional, I will essentially be helping AIIM to help me do my job.

If that isn’t recursive enough, let me know.

Focus of the Word

The Word is going to follow the things I deal with in the course of my work at AIIM. It is still going to focus heavily on Information Management and the Content Management aspects of the broader whole. Just expect to see posts on topics I wouldn’t have previously addressed.

I will not be sending out a bunch of hype. This is still my blog. I will talk more about AIIM, but that is because the issues that AIIM addresses are those same issues that I’ll be dealing with going forward.

Just from a different perspective.

The problem is that now people are talking about failure as if it is a good thing, something to be pursued. It isn’t.

FAILURE IS BAD.

If someone fails once, no biggie. If they fail more often, maybe it is because they don’t have the chops to proceed. Maybe they just suck.

Failure teaches you what doesn’t work. It doesn’t always teach you what does work. You may do something wrong, but if you adjust, you haven’t failed.

If you have truly failed, you need to not only analyze what went wrong, but why you didn’t see it in time. Why didn’t, or couldn’t, you adjust.

Most likely, you need help to learn the right way. Depending on the failure, you may need to add someone on your team.

Better yet, think on your weaknesses, we all have them, and act to get people on your team who can compensate.

Failure is to be avoided. It is a bad thing. Failure isn’t the end of the world, but if you decide that you are willing to fail, you likely will.

More than that, but I am leaving the world of Documentum. This year, for the first time since I started attending in 2000, I will miss the Documentum conference, aka EMC World.

These are some big changes for me. I thought I’d take some time and share.

Consult, Rinse, and Repeat

Five years ago, I was hired to build/lead the Enterprise Content Management practice at Washington Consulting, Inc. (WCI). Over the years, through ups and downs, I became a Director and the capabilities of WCI grew. Today WCI is in a much stronger position, by any measure, to solve the Information Management problems of its clients.

Meanwhile, the repetition started to become obvious. While the technology kept evolving and changing, the core challenges were constant. Organizational resistance, short-term financial goals, and the desire to just “throw”  the system over the wall and see what users do with it.

So it became obvious that it was time for new challenges. Of course, there is a side effect…

Leaving Documentum

I am leaving the world of Documentum behind. While that wasn’t a goal, I wasn’t trying to stay in the world of Documentum either.

The next year is going to be critical for EMC and their Documentum line. The Cloud-based Content Management train is leaving the station and this is the year that EMC can grab a spot in first class. It is going to be fun to watch.

Watch I will. Too many friends, colleagues, and clients have a vested interest in the outcome for me not to care. I’ve poured a lot of energy into that world over the years and I’ll always have an intense curiosity regarding Documentum’s fate. I’m rooting for EMC to succeed.

I’ll always care, it just isn’t going to be my problem anymore. At least for now.

The Next Chapter

So what is next? That is the subject for a post in the next week. I’m going to a position that I’ve been wanting for years with an organization that seems to be a natural fit. Since I’ve made the decision, the most consistent feedback I’ve received is, “That’s perfect!”

It likely isn’t perfect but it seemed like the right choice.

Well, I’ve been on “vacation” for the past week and feel rested enough to take some time to write. Coincidently enough, I have two posts to write quickly, the first being this post evaluating the predictions for 2011.

As I did for the 2010 predictions, I am going to score them as either correct, incorrect, or partial (50%).  The partial is for predictions that were correct in the causes, but the effects were off.

1. There will be a major acquisition that doesn’t involve Open Text. Correct! HP acquired Autonomy in one of the strangest and largest acquisitions in the past few years.
2. EMC will determine their Content Management future this year. Correct. They have a plan for the future that they have been executing upon consistently. It is the Next Generation Information Server along with EMC OnDemand. When you throw in the mew mobile client and the addition of the D2 interface from C6, EMC is saying that they aren’t going to be marginalized without a fight. The question of whether it is enough and in time is something we should learn in 2012.
3. “Enterprise 2.0” vendors will be reclassified. Partial. The theory is that people would using Enterprise 2.0 and start referring to tools by what they did. This is happening, but it is gradual. Too many marketing people aren’t ready to let go of the term yet. I feel I got this partially right but it is hard to prove.
4. Content Management in the Cloud will make a big splash.  Correct. Box is attacking the world while Nuxeo and Alfresco have jumped into the fray. EMC is working to provide a true cloud solution and DropBox has begun creating a non-consumer version of its product. I’ve been spending a lot of time working on a project to implement Documentum in an IaaS cloud provider for the Federal Government. The cloud has reached the CMS world and will only expand and mature.
5. Peter Monks will try to blackmail me. Correct, though he isn’t very good at it. You would think a recording of singing karaoke while wearing a mullet would be enough, but he can’t pull it off.
6. An iPad challenger will emerge, driving the tablet market. Partial. Instead of one challenger, there are lots of them. Samsung seems to be doing okay but the Kindle Fire seems to have the best shot at challenging the iPad.
7. eBook weaknesses will come to the forefront.  Correct, though I picked the wrong weaknesses. People just want more from their eReader. Just ask Amazon why they introduced the Kindle Fire, a simplified Android tablet. It isn’t an eReader in the traditional sense, yet it is doing well. My niece has one and she lives in an Apple family.

So that is a 6 out of 7. Not bad overall, especially when you consider that I graded fairly harsh. Apple is not the only tablet player in town anymore and the term Enterprise 2.0 seems to be in remission even according to Google.

That bump over 1.0 line, point “F”? That’s the Enterprise 2.0 conference. Social Buness seems to be picking-up the slack, which is a much better descriptor of many of the products. Spigit, a stalwart of many Enterprise 2.0 conferences seems to ignore both terms.

Now, onward to 2012!

If you haven’t read that post, go read it NOW. Forget this post. While I haven’t finished writing it, I can already tell you that his post is dramatically better. That said, this post also makes a lot less sense if you haven’t read his post.

The Sock Dilemma

One of the major points that Lee discusses is the fact that the continuously vanishing socks fuel Quantum Shopping. Having observed Quantum Shopping for years, whereas you spend money to save money and the savings goes somewhere in the multi-verse, I have a few points of observation:

• Socks are not directly related to Quantum Shopping
• Any material item can be used to drive the Quantum Shopping engine

In Lee’s case, the driver appears to be socks, but this is purely incidental. He focuses upon the common phenomenon of the missing sock. He correctly observes that they tend to vanish into a wormhole and are doing so at an alarming rate.

The only problem is that far more socks go into the wormhole than money returns.

What he completely forgets is the Law of Conservation of Energy.

Conserving More Than Energy

When a sock vanishes, it never disappears. It can’t. The Law of the Conservation of Energy clearly states the total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant over time. The thing is, if you define the isolated system as the entire multi-verse, energy is always conserved.

We just don’t always understand the why of it.

Which is why Lee needs to be more Zen about the whole sock issue. This realization came to me while talking with Cheryl. During that conversation, I realized I hadn’t had a sock vanish in years.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, I complete loads of laundry all the time where a sock invariably turns-up without its mate. When this happens, I put the sock in the front of the drawer. What is really interesting, half of the time, the other sock is already in the drawer.

When a sock vanishes into the wormhole, it is just relocated. Its displacement may be offset my money from Quantum Shopping, but I find that the best reaction is to wait. The sock is not destroyed. It will invariably be attracted by it’s opposite and be drawn back through the wormhole and into my wash.

Usually this just takes weeks, though it has taken months in the past.

Zen

Instead of delving into the messiness of Quantum Shopping and the crazy concept of spending money in order to save money, Lee should spend time in other activities, like writing blog entries at Chick-fil-a. He should be patient and simply await the return of the wayward sock. The return of the sock will negate the need for the Quantum Shopping experience.

Of course, I have observed Quantum Shopping driven by other needs, but by being more Zen and having faith in the more established, and easily understood, laws of the universe, Lee can avoid some Quantum Shopping.

• Where are they going?
• Do they know Records Management?
• Are they capable?

I had enough of an answer on each question to enter into a partnership with Nuxeo, but this was all about long-term planning and strategy. I thought I’d share what I learned while letting them learn that there are pros and cons to the publicity that they get by working with me, just ask EMC (who has accepted the balance).

Nuxeo World 2011, The Conference

Let’s start with the conference. It was unique, and not in a bad way. It was only Nuxeo’s second conference and it wasn’t a large one, though it was 50% bigger than last year. It was held in a theater, the Théâtre des Variétés, in the center of Paris which had the main stage and a small theater tucked into the upper reaches of the theater. While not friendly for those with bad knees, it was quite interesting to present to an actual theater (nice view!).

The downsides were the lack of places to chat privately, everything catered externally, and there were only two rooms for presentations. One theater was more than ample in size and the other was pushing its limits. It is very likely that Nuxeo will out-grow this location next year.

Still, it was good. The presenters were all very technically inclined and capable. This led to a large amount of real content and not a collection of marketing slides. The conversations after each presentation could go into as much detail as you could conceive.

In general, nice format. Small and technical, but good. It was easy to find whomever you needed to speak with on any topic during the conference.

One last detail that I shouldn’t forget, it was preceded by a two-day development sprint. Being an open-source project, anyone can contribute. External developers were invite to join the Nuxeo team to address specific capabilities. They had two days to make as much progress as possible. The award for the best progress was awarded on Thursday night (though I can’t remember what it was that won).

The People

I only need one word to sum them up, Smart. Everything else is details. Of course, when you are small, it is much easier to keep the quality. There were diverse backgrounds, visions, and specialties, but they were all smart.

Of course, this presents its own problems. While it has led to a great architecture and agile development process, outside perspectives from the broader Content Management arena are not widespread. Nuxeo is a product that feels a little tied to the academics of Content Management with Content Management developer requirements mixed in for good measure.

While this isn’t a bad thing, it does make it harder to be proactive in meeting what the market needs. That said, there are some newer faces in Nuxeo that have that broader viewpoint and they are spreading that knowledge. I also contributed a bit with my keynote and threw conversations I had throughout the few days I was in town.

Information Governance is one of those areas. The importance of governance to the broad market is something that is obvious to old-school Content Management people, but it is something that is sinking into Nuxeo’s collective consciousness. I think it sank in, but we’ll know for sure in the very near future.

The (Potential) Future of Nuxeo

The future is bright, assuming they to take on the Records Management and other governance pieces. They are offering Nuxeo in the cloud as a platform, not as an Amazon install. They have an extensive API library and are extremely active in standards. Their architecture is fresh and they seem to be actively working to keep it fresh.

There is a lot of opportunity in the Open Source market for another Content Management vendor that has Records Management. There is a lot of opportunity in the market for a company that can offer the same solution either on-premise or in the cloud. There is a lot of opportunity for a Content Management vendor that can successfully deliver a platform.

For the vendors that can be among the first to offer all these things, there is a chance to be one of the leaders in the space for the next decade.

Nuxeo is heading to this spot. It is the same spot as Box and many of the traditional Content Management vendors. They are approaching the spot from three different directions. Of course, once they get there, the market won’t care how they got there.

They’ll just want to buy it.

• Use a Scrum based development approach, 4 key disciplines
• Roadmap Management
• Modern Development Method and Tooling
• Heartbeat and Iterative Development Method
• Continuous QA and Release Method
• Stressing the constant QA of the product
• Opening the “roadmap” through Jira in the next week

• Showing the list of roadmap items from last year and color coding based upon if it has been completed
• Goals:
• Platform orientation
• Keep it technically up to date
• Improve the user experience for end-users and for implementers
• Nuxeo 5.5 in November (everything part of release)
• OpenSocial based collaboration features
• New Packages and installer
• Nuxeo IDE
• Nuxeo 6.0 next year (OSGi alignment)
• Removing EJB3 in 2012
• Full OSGi is a long road and doesn’t mix well with JEE well (currently)
• Want the move to be smooth
• Going to be expanding HTML 5 usage
• Improve Rich Media support
• Safe editing via Browser local storage, standardizing
• Better compliance with mobile devices
• Java 6 coming, including CDI (Contexts and Dependency Injection)
• Adding JOIN to NXQL queries
• Distributed cache system
• Extended support for Cloud storage (improve scalability)
• Integrate SOLR as external indexer
• Not replacing transactional built-in index
• Better Semantic search
• Allow complex search navigation
• Looking at a static WARs and EARs to run Nuxeo for Production environments that need to be static (Critical for controlled environments like Pharma and Government), Generate from existing Nuxeo instance
• Change how deployed, download platform plus any choice of products and add components later
• Reusable installer for App Builders
• Updating Flex connector to latest Flex version
• Wiki document type
• Improve validation of forms and add model to handle cross validation
• Creating documents in Word based upon template and metadata
• Synch with local file location
• Use background synch
• Based upon Automation Rest API
• clients for Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android
• Working on improving Content Routing in the Case Management Framework
• DAM becoming an addon for DM and Collaboration, adding asset browser to both apps
• Allow usage of rich media features on any types, leveraging facets
• Integrate support for HTML 5 streaming
• Integrating the Apache Stanbol semantic engine into Nuxeo

Was going to stick around for the next session as it was a keynote, but now we are breaking into sessions. Probably going to take care of a few things and relax.

All information in this post was gathered from the presenters and presentation. It does not reflect my opinion unless clearly indicated (Italics in parenthesis). Any errors are most likely from my misunderstanding a statement or imperfectly recording the information. Updates to correct information are reflected in red, but will not be otherwise indicated.

All statements about the future of Nuxeo products and strategy are subject to change at any time due to a large variety of factors.

[Slides now online on Slideshare]

• 1.8 Zettabytes of data will be produced in 2011
• 50% more data/content/information produced every year
• Linking the web to real-life people and concepts through relationships is the goal of the Semantic Web
• Four stages to move from Content Management Systems to Semantically enabled system
  • Extract meaning from raw data/content: done through advanced algorithms  and Natural Language Processing (I believe we are still stuck here, how to do it intelligently and accurately)
  • Connect information to form knowledge
  • Reason about this knowledge
  • Present this knowledge in actionable form
• When you are working on reliable metadata (RDFa embedded in web pages), rules /inference engines can infer actionable knowledge from your content
• Rules can also clean-up and flag errors when working with unreliable information
• Smart presentation system solves the information overload issue by contextualizing the information, essentially only showing the information that is relevant.
• Nuxeo is involved in the IKS Project which led to the Apache Stanbol project

Presenter change as Stefane steps down and turns it over to Olivier for some demos and detailed discussion of the Semantic engine (Apache Stanbol)

• Showing some good views of how the tech works, including how to fix incorrect assignments.
• Showed some good multi-lingual linking of the same entities
• Stanbol has the Apache OpenNLP, Apache Solr (index), and Apache Jena (semantic rules)
• Using Wikipedia to train the engine on identifying and tagging entities (Cool), hitting 80% accuracy in French and 71% percent on English (Need higher to get old content processed in my opinion, good progress though)

That’s it, time for lunch

All information in this post was gathered from the presenters and presentation. It does not reflect my opinion unless clearly indicated (Italics in parenthesis). Any errors are most likely from my misunderstanding a statement or imperfectly recording the information. Updates to correct information are reflected in red, but will not be otherwise indicated.

All statements about the future of Nuxeo products and strategy are subject to change at any time due to a large variety of factors.

As I didn’t write an rules post, using this paragraph. As with EMC World, I will try and take notes. Errors and omissions are likely mine. I’ll be using the normal disclaimer.

If you want to follow on Twitter, follow #NxX11.

The Notes

• Overview of Nuxeo, emphasis on frameworks that can be scaled up or down as necessary
• Diving into a series of client case studies (Only a few below).
• Intercontinental Hotels Group distributes rules and policies, integrated into their Guest Management App, located in the Nuxeo Cloud offering, built in “weeks”
• Electronic Arts is going to be using Nuxeo to manage their game delivery to testers to control access and track who releases games to the public without authorization
• Orange is distributing content through an Enterprise Portal. Over 10 million documents being delivered
• Showing growth of Nuxeo Studio Product. Stressed that it wasn’t downloads but actually usage.
• Run their test suite on every build, automatically, on the daily releases.
• Showed test results from past week. Didn’t hide failed tests
• Showed performance testing over time. Moving up overall but had big dig when they switched to Java [Edit: Occurred with switch to JBoss 5 as per comment below] which they have more than recovered from
• Improvements:
• Hot-reload (Critical for live cloud-based apps)
• OAuth and OpenSocial
• CSS engine
• Dynamic Schemas
• AWS s3 Blob Store, used by some clients as archive storage area
• Local Configuration for per-domain tenants
• Mobile SDKs for Android (now) and iOS (soon), includes cached Content Lists and a Store for offline access
• Core Repository is going to be Eclipse Apricot, Full OSGi, will be using it themselves, not a give and forget
• Developer Experience comes first, Build/Test/Run in the cloud or on-premise
• Nuxeo Cloud is Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
• Hosting on Amazon is easy, switching to a Platform
• (Missed a lot of this detail-wise, looks very cool and mentioned switching between private and public clouds)

All information in this post was gathered from the presenters and presentation. It does not reflect my opinion unless clearly indicated (Italics in parenthesis). Any errors are most likely from my misunderstanding a statement or imperfectly recording the information. Updates to correct information are reflected in red, but will not be otherwise indicated.

All statements about the future of Nuxeo products and strategy are subject to change at any time due to a large variety of factors.

Simply put, Box is doing well. Some felt that the conference served as their coming-out party. Since the conference, Box announced the finalization of a round of funding worth $81 million that they mentioned during the conference and are looking at expansion of their capacity. Box is taking a lot of mindshare and some market share as well.

But is it deserved?

Show me the Money!

Box is quick to share investment information because it shows momentum, growth, and excitement. Other financial information is harder to come by and all of it can be misleading without the full set of numbers. Privately held companies only release numbers that make them look good so you never know how much they reflect the current state of things. One thing that is definite, $81 million is a lot.

One concern expressed by some is the volume of funding versus revenue. Not having all the numbers, I can say that there are two things that makes Box different from traditional Content Management companies when looking at the numbers:

First, revenue is recognized monthly. Box is a subscription service, so you don’t get the big license revenue bubble. What you get instead is a steadily increasing stream of money. Oracle does this with maintenance funds and Box is doing it will all funding. In theory, each month will be better than the previous month. It is that current vector that really matters, not historical figures from 3-5 years ago. Of course, maybe people companies are paying up-front for set time-periods, but without more detail, it is impossible to really throw stones.

Secondly, services, cloud-based or otherwise, are expensive up-front. To be successful, Box is going to need at least 2 major data centers in the US, one in Canada, and one in most major European countries. Each country has its own laws about data and privacy protection. Many companies want to keep their data outside of the US to avoid the Patriot Act while other countries require companies to keep data within the country.

I haven’t even talked about the advanced needs of governments.

If Box is going to win the Enterprise, they have to go global. If they are going to do that, they need to build.

All these data centers cost money in power, equipment and people. What they don’t cost is software as that is already developed.

Of course, lots of good companies have money that aren’t in Content Management. Future revenue will be driven by what Box actually delivers. Let’s look at the state of the product.

They Have Bells, How About Whistles?

I reviewed Ron Miller’s overview of Boxworks and decided I needed more details on the features that were announced, so I broke down and went to the Box blog.

As with any company blog, you are going to have to shift through hype, and Box excels at cooking-up hype. After looking at it, here is what matters to the business customer:

• Improved Synch. This really boils down to having Mac synchs. Very sexy, very important for some markets, but not critical in most. It will make it easier for Box people to use their own software though.
• Trusted Access is actually interesting. It tracks all the applications and browsers accessing the content and let’s you manage it. What that means and how that feels, remains to be seen. It is a basis for detecting and preventing unauthorized access, critical for cloud-based software.

That’s it. Both good features that will help broaden the appeal in companies. Yes, Box improved the SalesForce integration and a few other items, but those are the things that I see that are “real” and relevant to companies I talk to regularly. There is talk of improved workflow over the basic tasking that exists, but without more details, it is just trivia.

So What’s Missing?

Heard this on multiple fronts…Custom METADATA!!! This is a entry level feature. I’m not talking 50 fields with integrated business rules, but 5-7 fields with a simple default would be nice. Dates, text, and lookups would be a nice, simple, start. Tags are great for personal use, but it fails for the larger organization.

To put this in perspective for my regular readers, even WordPress gives me metadata.

To be honest, almost every other gap (CMIS!) is just trivia until the metadata feature appears. Box needs to read about what makes a Content Management System and go from there. Box has a lot of great features and I wouldn’t remove any of them, but they have a while to go until they are a real Content Management system.

That matters. After all, they are targeting SharePoint….

Big Game Hunting

A lot of the twitter debates about Box is their targeting SharePoint and the Enterprise when they are missing key features. Peter Monks clearly laid the baseline argument for the opposition:

To justify the claim that “Box is like Sharepoint” you need to have some minimum set of Sharepoint features (or equiv).

In theory, he is correct. What he neglects is that a lot of SharePoint installation use SharePoint as a glorified file store. While this is changing as people realized that they are doing something wrong, others want something simpler. Box is simpler.

Of course, Office 365 is simpler than on-premise SharePoint.

For those that want more than a glorified file share or basic collaboration, SharePoint works. If you start to scale up and want even more features, right now you turn to the established Content Management solutions like Documentum, FileNet, Oracle, Nuxeo, Open Text, and Alfresco (there are more).

Here is the situation. Box is going to snipe at the bottom of the SharePoint market and get dissatisfied customers and those with no solution. Meanwhile, SharePoint is going to keep sniping customers from the established vendors.

Where will this lead? Nobody knows for sure. Given the history of disruptive technologies, Box and other cloud-based vendors will dominate the market while SharePoint and a couple traditional vendors own the on-premise market.

There is a shot that one of the traditional vendors will make the leap to the cloud successfully, but that is a long, hard road.

Summing Up the Summary

Box has money, drive, knowledge, and a platform. What they need is the features to move them further from Dropbox and closer to every other Content Management vendor. They have some clear market(ing) advantages but they need to hurry up and deliver before someone else does it and takes their momentum to win the market.