A funny thing happened over the Memorial Day weekend that just went by, Word of Pie turned two-years-old on the 24th.  I told the story about how it started, an almost-rant about EMC World 2007, several times last week, but didn’t actually get around to writing this post to celebrate the landmark until now.

I understand that not everyone might think that writing a blog for two years is a grand achievement, but try it out sometime.  The blog is a lot more work than I ever thought and the rewards are soft (i.e. non-financial) and infrequent at times.  I do enjoy those rewards though, even it isn’t why I do this.

Activities of Pie

Let’s cover those soft rewards.  There really weren’t that many to talk about last year, but this year, things are a little different.  Here is what I’ve been up to this year:

• CMIS Awareness: As you may have noticed, CMIS has been a pet crusade of mine. I had been talking about an ECM SOA standard for a while when CMIS was finally announced this year.  Already being a member of AIIM’s Interoperable ECM Committee, I was able to leverage the Word of Pie to extend our visibility which made the AIIM conference, Info360, more productive and led to some speaking engagements.
• Speaking at EMC World: This was an extension of the CMIS Awareness, and my contributions to the Documentum community opened the door.  While it has zero impact on my decision to attend EMC World this year, it sure made it easier to explain to clients why I wasn’t around last week. It was also great exposure for CMIS to be able to talk about the AIIM implementation in front of some Documentum focused people.
• Collaboration with Engineers: I’ve traded emails and messages with Andrew and Craig for a while now.  The highlight was when I let a comment drop about some issues we were having with Retention Policy Services on a client and I was able to actually reach out to the product architects.  We resolved the issues (mostly around vague documentation) and came up with a solution to help both my client and people that hit the issue in the future. I’ve also gotten to know architects of some other products and that has helped me in my job.  Oh, did I mention that it has been fun to boot?

The ultimate in good soft rewards came when people walked up to me at EMC World and thanked me for blogging.  That was great.  Thank you.

Goals of Pie

Last year, I set some goals.  Like any annual review, let’s evaluate those first.

• ECM SOA Standard Progress: Yes, thanks to Alfresco, EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Open Text, Oracle, and SAP we have CMIS. The movement is spreading.  I can’t take any credit for the standard, but I like to think I’ve helped people understand it better.
• EMC Developer Network Growth: Yes, though not sure how much is from my efforts. I would like to applaud the Documentum Developer Edition release as a result of the community telling EMC what they need.  EMC is listening, so let’s keep putting the message out there.
• Party at EMC World: Well, not exactly.  I met a lot of people, but I didn’t live-up to my end of the bargain by being the vocal advocate that I wanted to be this past year. I can blame client work and my partial burn-out last fall, but doesn’t change the fact that my goal wasn’t met.

As a bonus, I did start using Twitter and use that to supplement my postings with thoughts and links that I don’t have time to write a full post about.  If you have read this far, you should jump on board and start following people.  Don’t feel pressure to write things until you get the feel for Twitter, but you are missing a lot if you aren’t out there.  I am @piewords, so join and follow.

This year, I’m going to keep the goals simple….

• More Sessions at EMC World: We need more sessions at EMC World for developers and end-users. We’ve got 4-6 months to lobby for this, so let’s get started.  I’ll write a post later to outline some thoughts, but don’t wait to comment on the topic.
• ECM Design Patterns: I’m going to push ECM Design Patterns through.  We need them to become an organized discipline. Stay tuned or go ahead and get started on the EMC Developer Network.  The framework is already started.  This effort is all about critical mass and I aim to help it get there.
• Major Vendor CMIS Support: We don’t have this yet, at least not enough. We need everyone on-board.  That will require some outreach, but I think that in a year, we can get there.

No time for World Peace this year.  Maybe next year we’ll have a good enough platform to deliver that as well.

Numbers of Pie

All bloggers track their numbers and I am no different.  Here are some basic ones to wrap up this post.  Nothing too surprising as my best day and week were from this past EMC World.  After last year’s spike, it was expected.  All numbers are courtesy of WordPress.

• 97,000+ hits in the last year (150,000+ total)
• 1,057 on my best day, May 20, 2009
• 3,839 on my best week, last week
• 6,500+ hits on my most popular post (almost all in the past year)
• 530+ hits on the topic I care about the most (though I probably need to write an update to the post)

What does next year have in store? Only one way to find out. Let’s try to have fun on the journey.