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Crazy Uncle Owen Loses a Friend

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For years, I’ve had a crazy uncle, Owen Tedford. Now crazy Uncle Owen always like to collect baseball cards. I’ve always liked baseball cards so I always like to visit with Owen for short periods of time.

We always considered him eccentric and not crazy until he started buying other collections. While that wasn’t crazy in and of itself, it was what he did, or didn’t do, with the cards. He wouldn’t look at the collection for overlap before buying it. He would see one or two cards that he didn’t have and just buy.

Once uncle Owen got the collection, he would put the new collection in his shed and slowly cull it for individual cards to add to his main collection. The leftover parts of the collections slowly deteriorating outside in the shed.

We were worried about crazy Uncle Owen being crushed by his rotting collection of cards on a trip to the shed. We figured it was only a few more years until the sheer dead weight of it all collapsed. Then he met Artie, the town loon.

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Documentum Patch Process, Adding a Touch of Common Sense

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I haven’t been writing a lot as I’ve been going crazy at work and nothing has jumped out at me as time sensitive. I’ve starting writing some “expert” blogs for AIIM on Enterprise Content Management, their label, so you can get a small fix over in the AIIM Community.

It is the summer and things are pretty slow going in the industry, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t build-up to a good rant. I was doing a little research in some release notes for Documentum the other day and something that annoyed me last Spring hit me full in the face.

The proliferation of patches. WOW! Let’s look at this for a minute.

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Folders, A Nutritious Part of Your Content Management Diet

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Sean Hederman of Signate Document Management wrote a rebuttal of  my AIIM article defending folders. He admits a bias as he works for a Document Management vendor built around search. I thought of writing a short response saying that he missed the point of my article and that he had nothing to rebut, but where is the fun in that?

My article was itself a rebuttal against an AIIM article saying we should get rid of folders by Chris Riley. I never meant to imply that we should get rid of search, only that we shouldn’t get rid of folders. I like search, and metadata for that matter. I complain vocally when search doesn’t work well.

With that in mind, here are his points. Each heading is a direct quote of a heading from his post.

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Oracle Buys FatWire, Now What?

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If you missed it, Oracle bought FatWire yesterday. Whether or not this was a shock depends on who you ask. In fact, I suspect that the tension of the sale has been rippling though events for several months.

This acquisition raises several questions, such as, does anyone care, that is, outside of the FatWire install base and those competing against FatWire? I think it matters. Not because of the actual purchase, but because of what Oracle does with FatWire. That will show us volumes about their long-term Content Management strategy.

Before proceeding into my world of hypotheticals, you should read Real Story Group’s collection of thoughts on the deal.

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Creating Thought Leadership

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Every company, to some degree, wants to be considered a thought leader in their industry. Vendors want to drive new sales and reassure their install base. Consultants/analysts want to have potential clients knocking on their doors for answers. The final side of the triangle, Buyers, they want their competitors to follow them and attract talent to work for them.

(Note that roles shift from market to market. Nuxeo is a vendor in the Content Management market but a Buyer in the ERP market.)

The importance varies, but it is a goal that any company wanting to be a leader in their industry wants to achieve. It isn’t easy. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. So the question is, how do you do it?

Taking the software market as my example, given my experience there, I am going to explore the process.

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The Allure of Selling Product over Services

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imageA few weeks ago, Peter Monks asked the twitterverse the following question:

Does anyone else think that services companies claiming to be product companies is weird? Seems like a rather difficult pivot to execute.

I agreed that it was a difficult pivot but that it wasn’t weird. In fact, I did it once. Ten years ago, when I was with Infodata System, I transitioned from a consultant to a Product Manager for about two years. My team took the results of a consulting engagement and created the AnnoDoc product. It was an annotation tool, similar to the current Documentum PDF Annotation tool, but with less overhead.

Why did we do it? How did we do it? Why were we successful? Let’s dive in and look.

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Popularity in Leadership

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image Had a really strange day today. Lot’s of thought on strategy at work, a series of striking events, participation in #LeadershipChat, and finally an album that took me back to a reflective time in my life.

During #LeadershipChat, Lou Imbriano said True leaders have little concern with popularity ~ which leads to credibility. This lead to a mini-debate that was partly brought about by trying to make things black-and-white and the fact that we were communicating 140 characters at a time.

One key distinction is that there are two aspects of leadership that are impacted by popularity, the leaders and the decisions they make.

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Looking Ahead to CMIS 1.1

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This week, over in Seattle, the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee is getting together for face-to-face meetings complete with plugfests every afternoon. It promises to be fun, but they are trying to accomplish some real work during all of this. The largest piece is the thought they are giving to what is going to be in the next version of CMIS.

Now I have some definite opinions which I am going to share. In order to facilitate disagreements, I am publishing the list of items they are taking under advisement. I have added bold to the ones that I care about the most.

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EMC Goes Mobile, Creating a Redundant Déjà Vu Experience

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You know the guy: Ned Ryerson the insurance agent in Groundhog Day, One of the strangest things to happen at EMC World was the announcement by EMC of a mobile client for the iPad. It is scheduled to arrive in Q3 of 2011 (I made them commit to a specific Q3). Some people even said July 15, but I’d be more than happy with an arrival before Labor Day.

So why is that strange? Doesn’t everyone need a mobile client? Isn’t that a cornerstone of Choice Computing? Doesn’t Sarah, the new user, want access to information anywhere on every device. Well, you are correct on all fronts.

The strange part is that when you take a step back, you realize that the market is already addressing this need.

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Collaboration, Just a Documentum Side Effect

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Last year I posted an article on how CenterStage was the Latest ex-Collaboration Tool from EMC. Turns out I understated the case. EMC isn’t going to be building a collaboration tool, at least not one purposely built to encourage collaboration.

In many ways the announcements at this year’s EMC World just reaffirmed the direction set last year. Last year I was sad. This year, I’m starting to lose my sense of humor.

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