Giving Back to the Community

1 Comment

New Picture (5)I wrote last fall about the ethical need for organizations to give back to the community to help those whom they disrupt. After all, if I create something that eliminates 20% of the accountants in the world, then taking some of the profit to help the community reabsorb the accountants back into society is the right thing to do.

I have always believed that one should always give back to the Community as a whole. I was a Boy Scout leader before I had kids to pass on what I had learned in Scouting. I was part of a service fraternity in college that had real, not token, requirements about participating in and leading service projects.

Continue reading →

Document Management versus Content Management

4 Comments

Things used to be simple. In the 90s, I delivered Document Management solutions. They were simple, straightforward, and they worked. With the start of the new millennium, I started delivering Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions. The difference was that we were supposed to be handling content that weren’t documents. This included pictures, videos, and web pages.

Except that I wasn’t often doing that.

Sure, I delivered a few Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems and created some websites and portals. When you got down to it, I spent most of my time delivering slightly more evolved Document Management solutions with some process thrown in to spice things up.

Forget “Enterprise”. It was always solutions solving specific business problems, at least on the successfully projects. At best, I was simply delivering Content Management, not ECM.

Continue reading →

Strategy Versus Tactics in Content Management

One of the things I REALLY like about my job is the chance to talk to clients, prospects, and people throughout the industry. Nothing helps you learn a technology or vertical like a project, but nothing helps you keep a broader perspective than talking to a wide array of people.

Last month I visited two such companies that were taking different approaches to the same situation. While both approaches have benefits, I began to ask myself…

Which is the best approach?

Continue reading →

My Car, the Weather, and the Internet of Things

1 Comment

CMS Wire just published an article of mine on the Internet of Things (IOT) and how the IOT could be used to serve business. I want to take a moment to share a section that I axed out of my article. It didn’t fit the article but I think helps show the benefit of the IOT.

I recently got the new Mazda 6. It has all the gadgets. I can listen to Pandora, connect my phone and iPod, and use it to find my way around town in the remote chance that I get lost. It even has a thermometer on it to tell me the temperature outside.

With all of that technology, it shouldn’t take much for my car to be contributor to the IOT.

It would be pretty cool for the car companies to sell to the Weather Service all of this data. Imagine, fleets of cars providing instant temperature readings to gauge current weather conditions. Add in the windshield wiper and headlight data, even more detailed analysis could be performed.

Continue reading →

Building Your Systems for Christmas and Easter

2 Comments

I was chatting with a customer the other day about their Alfresco implementation and trying to better understand both what they were doing currently and what they hoped to achieve in 2014. During the conversation, they discussed a current project to increase the scale of their current infrastructure. As I thought through the process, a familiar phrase ran through my head.

You don’t build a church for Christmas or Easter.

As I mulled that thought over, I realized that when it came to systems, that it didn’t apply.

Continue reading →

Secure the Application, Not the Device

3 Comments

I was reading an article by Patrick Gray, A radical idea for Mobile Device Management: Don’t bother, when I realized that I wasn’t alone in this world. I have long viewed Mobile Device Management (MDM) as a Red Herring and it felt good to find an ally.

For years, people have fought against restrictions on their company computers. This has been part of the spur behind the Bring Your Own Device/App/Cloud (BYOD) movement of the past several years. Do we want to head down that same path with mobile devices where we are dealing with an even wider variety of devices and less inherent control over the operating system than we did before BYOD complicated things?

Let’s think this through.

Continue reading →

Predicting 2014

1 Comment

I know I am a tad late on my prediction post for 2014, but I have had a hard time coming to terms with what will happen this year. At this point, it is easy to predict where things are going overall, but specific events over the next 12 months? Much more challenging.

I learned this by evaluating my 2013 predictions. The ones that didn’t come to fruition are still trending in the right direction. Those predictions just failed to hit that magic event before the end of 2013.

Well, I am going to try again this year. I am going to lean more towards trends and less on specific events. I could predict Open Text is going to make a large acquisition and that SharePoint will be declared dead by {insert large number here} prognosticators this year, but those things happen EVERY year which makes it feel like cheating.

What can we expect in 2013?

Continue reading →

Leveraging CMIS to Create Strong Business Applications

3 Comments

One of the things that I missed during my tour at AIIM was working with partners. I’m not talking about consultants, though I missed them as well. I missed the technology vendors. When I was at the Alfresco Summits last month, I was able to see a lot of vendors creating some cool technology to enhance a wide variety of Content solutions.

It was particularly fun to see several vendors that I had worked with in the past. IGC’s Brava product was one of those. Their viewer and annotation tool is pretty much the standard in large swathes of the pharmaceutical industry as they are vendor agnostic.

Another one that was good to reconnect with was Generis. One reason is because their CEO still has to pay up from a bet we made during the last World Cup. The other is because of what they are doing with Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS). While most of the industry has been coasting on the standard, Generis has been working hard to show its potential.

Continue reading →

2013: Waiting for the Culmination of Everything

2 Comments

New Picture (2)In 2013, one trend that I had been watching for years finally culminated in the next stage. I got a position with Alfresco that will allow me to make a difference in the future of the industry. While it took longer than I thought it would, the future arrived.

In looking at my Predictions for 2013, I didn’t do well…at all. If it wasn’t for a slam-dunk prediction, I would have failed to even be half right.

Let’s see how poorly I did.

Continue reading →

The Changing World of the Content Professional

1 Comment

I wrote last month about the Next Generation Content Professional. That post was directly inspired by the presentation I was giving at the 2013 Alfresco Summit in Barcelona. My talk, along with all the Summit sessions, are now available for viewing.

In addition to all the normal breakout sessions, the Summit Keynotes are also available for your enjoyment. The keynotes include talks from our CEO Doug Dennerline, Andrew McAfee on Big Data’s Three Questions, Jimmy Wales talking about A Wiki Future, and Simon Wardley explaining the new reality of Situation Normal, Everything Must Change. There are several others that I encourage you to check out.

Finally, I wanted to share links for my panels on Running a Successful Content Management Project. I moderated one in Barcelona and again in Boston, but with two different panels. The participants were all business users, so the advice would apply to a project using ANY Content Management software. I greatly enjoyed the panels because it was a chance for me to learn more about how organizations are using Alfresco. Each panel was different, so if you enjoy one, you will enjoy them both.