Craig Randall recently posted how he was presenting on Building Content-Enabled Applications at EMC World, at least until he was downed by injury. Regardless of his injury, this is a topic of great interest to me and I had a few conversations over the past year with him on the topic. I wanted to chime in on his post to both amplify it and see if we can get some dialog going in advance of the conference.
Information
Requirements, Worth the Read
Over the years, I’ve read, written, reviewed, and otherwise made use of a large variety of Requirements documents. Many were exercises in typing, some were a bare minimum to meet a checkbox, and others were useful tools. The latter ones are invaluable, and the others should be so, but aren’t due to process-heavy development cycles or teams just trying to “deliver the mail”.
Regardless of the type of Requirements document provided, it is important to not only understand the requirements, but to know how they might impact each other. Some of this requires experience, the rest just requires a little time.
I present three, out of many, situations that could have been avoided if a little attention had been applied to understanding the requirements.
Curse of the Old Requirement
SourceOne, EMC’s Worst Guarded Secret Arrives
For months, upon months, I’ve been hearing about SourceOne. Multiple friends at EMC occasionally let the name drop, while others would talk about something coming up and I would say, You mean SourceOne? I eventually learned what it was, but I had to be quiet. I told some clients, soon EMC will have an nice eDiscovery option for you, but in the meantime, these are your choices.
When I was up at AIIM, they made the announcement, held a fancy webcast or two, and posted material for all to see. Was it worth the wait?
What the Heck is SourceOne?
The Challenge of CMIS
I started this to talk about some of the things out there, but there is sooo much that I am drawing the line. Kas is writing some good things on CMIS as he attempts to grok it. Others, like Jon Marks, are grappling with CMIS as well. They raise some excellent points that probably deserve posts unto themselves. I find myself, today, focusing on the more immediate and of the more “outside-the-box” thoughts.
Updates and Announcements
EMC World Orlando, 2009 Edition
Well, I finally broke down and registered for EMC World. This year it is May 18-22 in Orlando. I got my hotel reservations months ago and wasn’t in a rush for the actual registration as the price has yet to change. I don’t need a free gift for registering early. In this economy, it is all about the Benjamins and the impact on the balance sheet, so no discount, no early registration push.
I was thinking about talking about my plans for EMC World, which looks pretty good, but the I realized something…This will be my 10th Documentum User Conference! So I have decided to flash back a bit to the previous conferences.
Upcoming CMIS Webinar
Just wanted to take a quick break to let everyone know that I will be speaking on Alfresco’s webinar on CMIS this Thursday, April 9th, at Noon EDT. Unleashing CMIS: From Federated Search to Developer Tools gives an introduction to CMIS, including some history, and then dives into the creation of the AIIM iECM Committee’s CMIS Demo. I’ll be talking about the entire process and then showing a brief demo of the actual application. At the end there will be a Question and Answer session.
So if you missed the talk at AIIM, or are just late coming to the CMIS party, come along and see the first multi-vendor CMIS implementation.
Register here.
How CMIS Made Me Re-Visit Visual Studio
By now, if you are a regular reader, you know that I worked on the AIIM iECM Committee’s CMIS Demo for the AIIM 2009 Conference, Info360. If you read my initial write-up on the effort, you saw that we built the thing using .NET. Specifically, ASP.NET for the UI and I wrote C# for the guts of the search federator. The question you may be asking is why did Pie choose to use Visual Studio 2008 when he has been living in the Java world of Documentum and open source for so incredibly long?
Well, the decision to use .NET was based on simple math. A free, reliable, IIS Server to host an application is better than paying for a server to host a LAMP stack. The other thing you may not realize is that I used to be a certifiable Microsoft developer, or is that certified? No matter…let me explain.
My Day at AIIM Expo 2009 with CMIS
Okay, let’s be clear. I didn’t travel around with CMIS all day. On the other hand, CMIS got me to the AIIM Expo this year, opened a few doors, and started many a conversation. It is amazing what standing on a soapbox for a year and a half can accomplish. It was an interesting day that was well spent and I wish I had two days at the conference. I was always rushing trying to get to see everyone and talk to everyone, and I failed. I did accomplish my primary objective, and that was a success.
How the iECM CMIS Demo for the AIIM Conference was Made
Okay, that title should handle all of the words I need for lots of hits. 🙂 In all seriousness, that title is exactly what I am focusing on in this post. I’m going to cover some of the background and non-technical challenges in putting this demonstration together so that you can better appreciate what went into the effort. You can read the official announcement for the official description.
Before I do that, I want to offer thanks to the following:
- Thomas Pole: Thomas is the chair of the iECM committee for AIIM. He was in charge of this demo and was able to identify a host platform for us to run the system on for no charge. In addition, he built the User Interface while I focused on the back-end components.
- Betsy Fanning: Betsy is the Director of Standards at AIIM. She helped keep us on track and coordinated with the various vendors that participated in this effort.
- The iECM Committee: They helped make sure that what we were doing made sense from a business perspective and worked with us to develop the requirements and design.
- The Vendors: This is more than the obvious ones. I’ll go into more details in a subsequent post. I just want to say now that all the vendors involved worked hard in this effort. Just because you don’t see their content right now doesn’t mean that they didn’t participate.
- Harris Corporation and Washington Consulting, Inc.: Thomas’s and my companies, respectively, helped us by allowing us time and additional resources to build and put our pieces together. We both have full-time day jobs and only support from our companies made this possible.
Okay, on to the show…
Documentum and the Search for Search
Those of you that follow Documentum’s products know that search has been a bug-a-boo the last few years. When 5.3 was rolled-out, there was much promised around faster search. It is here, but at a price. Additional hardware is needed and the version of FAST used by Documentum isn’t VMWare safe. To be fair, dedicating a server to search is part of the reason we have better performance, but it hasn’t been the panacea that we wanted.
In 7.0, we are looking at the prospect of Lucene support for the more plug-and-play repositories, while the larger ones will still be able to leverage a larger, multi-node, FAST installation. (Works great! Seriously, I mean it.) This is fine, but supporting two search engines, neither of which you actually own, is an issue for any vendor.
So what is the solution? Last week I read an article speculating on the prospect of EMC looking for a search company to add to their portfolio. Now the article was pure speculation, but that is what makes it fun. Let’s see if it makes sense and who could EMC acquire.
Word of Pie 