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Turning the ECM Definition Around

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Taking a little break before getting back to the Documentum series, I wanted to write a quick post on the definition of Enterprise Content Management.

Back in October, there was some debate on updating the definition of ECM.  Since then, there has been discussions out there about whether the term ECM should even be used anymore.  My basic opinion is, and has been, that we need to fix/update the definition, not the term.  Changing the term would require a lot of work to educate people for very little gain.

With that in mind….

ECM Redefined, Updated

So here is my updated definition as it stands now:

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the coordinated management of all content throughout an organization, allowing for people and systems to access and manage content from within any business context using platform agnostic standards.

I took some advice from before, replacing centralized with coordinated and removing the phrase empowerment of all content from the definition.  I still like the concept behind "empower", but until I can find a better way to express it, here we go.

Thinking of stealing a phrase from Andrew McAfee and adding "to achieve business goals" to the end of the definition, but I don’t want the sentence to get too wordy.

One last note, it doesn’t talk about applications, just about managing content.  This maintains that separation of platform and application.

Thoughts?

Documentum Renewal: Focus on the Core

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I just started writing a series on what EMC should do with their Documentum product as part of my Christmas gift to EMC. That part is key…this is a gift from the community because we want Documentum to be better and to stick around.

Why do I say the community? Simple enough…because I hear these things from many users at different installations across multiple verticals. I hear things from clients, partners, competitors, and random people at meetings.

We criticize because we care.

That being said, my first post in this series, on Application Separation, had a great reply from Lee Smith which is worth looking at.  Take a moment.

Today we are looking at the Content Server, the engine that makes everything work.

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Documentum Renewal: Application Separation

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This is the first in a series that I am writing as a Christmas present to EMC.  I want them to think about Documentum as a platform for the future and not on just adding on chunks that can be used to drive revenue.  Revenue is important, but investment now means revenue in the future.

After all, if they want their vision of SkyNet to come true, they need to get to work.

Why Web Publisher Sucks

I talked recently about how there are many ECM vendors out there that have sub-par applications, like Web Publisher from Documentum, that shouldn’t be required to be an ECM vendor.  It isn’t that they aren’t capable of writing good applications.  It is that the landscape changes faster than the release cycles for the platform.

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Redefining the Core Tech of ECM

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For several months, I’ve been tinkering with an idea in my head.  I’ve watched as EMC and other large ECM vendors fell further behind in the WCM space.  For every advancement that has been made, there were losses to the market.  It is at the point that if you aren’t deploying massive websites to server farms, you wouldn’t even look at the larger vendors.image

And yet, nothing changes.  The large vendors keep taking one step for every two that the market makes.  I think there will be a change, and CMS Watch, in their excellent 2010 Predictions, made a prediction similar to my thought process:

1) Enterprise Content Management and Document Management will go their separate ways

When you read the description, it is clear that they are seeing the same things, but they appear to be throwing the emphasis in the wrong direction.

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Looking at CMIS 1.0, Thinking of 2.0

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As you hopefully know by now, CMIS 1.0 was released for public comment thru December 22nd, and the excitement is building in the community and the press.  If you haven’t looked at it, and want to provide feedback on the CMIS standard, the time is now.image

For more information on what CMIS can do for you, here are some useful references, including three of my posts on the topic (newest first):

I’ve been looking at CMIS 1.0 from a functional perspective, along with some others in the community.  If I want to solve business problem X using a CMIS-based application, what do I need?  What would make things easier?  Using my experience from building the AIIM iECM demo and many discussions with others in the industry, I’ve come up with a few things that I’d like to see CMIS support in 2.0.

Note the assumed nature of the next version of the spec.  If there isn’t another version coming, then what is the point?

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What Can We Expect from ECM Analysts?

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There has been a lot of talk the last few months about the integrity, and completeness, of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant reports.  While the lawsuit against Gartner from ZL Technologies was dismissed, at least for now, there are a lot of questions being asked about the level of influence upon the market by Gartner, and upon Gartner by the market.

The questions can also be applied to Forrester and other analyst reports in the ECM industry, and other industries for that matter.  I’m confining my discussion today to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant and Forrester’s Wave for ECM as I know them best.

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Nuxeo Comes Courting

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This year, Nuxeo has been working pretty hard to increase awareness of their offering in the ECM marketplace.  They have taken a prominent role in the Apache Chemistry implementation for CMIS and were one of three vendors, Alfresco and EMC being the other two, that were able to get a CMIS-ready repository up in time to support the AIIM CMIS demo for the conference this year.

Then came September when they hired Cheryl McKinnon to be their Chief Marketing Officer. Cheryl and I had both come from the world of PC DOCS and had worked for the same boss back in 1999 (she was in training and I was a consultant).  Cheryl, knowing my love for all things ECM, offered to give my team and I a briefing on Nuxeo, complete with a demo by CEO Eric Barroca.  I accepted the offer and was glad that I did…

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A Tale of Two Documentum User Groups

In the last month, I attended two Documentum User Group meetings.  They were very different experiences, beneficial in different ways.  The NY group was fun and was a chance to talk to lots of different users

I am going to do something slightly different this post, I’m going to focus on the positives. Let’s see how that works.

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Forrester Makes Gartner Look Inclusive

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A couple months ago, Gartner released their annual ECM Magic Quadrant (which I looked at).  Sure enough, being an odd year, Forrester released their ECM Wave.  I see the pros of waiting two years as the larger vendors take that long, or longer, for a significant release.  On the other hand, you have longer to wait for new members to show up.

Well not in Forrester’s world.  Only one new vendor (HP) was added and a few were cut, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

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Tip: Identifying Documentum Object Types

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Last month, I ran into an error.  You know the type, vague, irritating, and an r_object_id that I didn’t recognize. (Okay, I never “recognize” an id given the complexity, but usually I can figure things out from the first two digits.)  The error basically said that the r_object_id “53…” did not exist.

Anyway, a quick look didn’t reveal anything. I determined that it wasn’t derived by dm_sysobject by doing a quick query on the table. I decided to throw the question out to Twitter and see what happened.

Okay fearless #Documentum hackers, what object type begins its r_object_id with a ’53’?

I got two replies, one from Lee Dallas (@ldallasBMOC) and another from David Matheson (@davidfmatheson).

@piewords #Documentum 53 is dm_literal_expr – if you are asking-you need to run data dictionary publish,clear caches restart app svrs

@piewords #Documentum @ldallasBMOC beat me to it, I would add you can check IDfId for the full list of what’s what in any version of DFC.

So Lee gave me the fix, which had already been executed, but he told me why the restart of the client application worked. (The Data Dictionary runs regularly in our environment, so it had already run). David taught me how to answer the question in the future.  I also found another way to make the determination as well.  I’m going to share them both now.

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