The Unspoken CMS SaaS Dilemma

6 Comments

This is the last of my “drafty” posts that I’m shoving out. This one was a lot more evolved. I do want to say that this post was inspired by a chat I had with Andrew Chapman at a conference a few months ago. This is the first of at least two posts. No promises if/when the next one will surface.

Once more into the abyss…

There is a lot of attention being paid to the up-and-coming cloud-based Content Management providers. The reason why is obvious, Content Management offered as a SaaS offering has the potential to solve many of the problems faced by the system integrators of today. There is the problem is that they don’t have the features required today and their ability to add all of those features is limited by their SaaS nature.

Continue reading →

EMC World 2011: Rules of the Road

18 Comments

Another year, another EMC World. There are a few things I am tracking that promises to make this year interesting. I can’t really share yet, but trust me, you’ll want to stay tuned.

We are still a week away, but it is going to be an incredibly busy week for me, so I want to get this out now. For those that are unfamiliar, I pretty much type notes at every sessions and hit publish at the end of the session, essentially sharing my session notes with you. These rules are very similar to last years Rules (I even cut-and-paste for a draft), but I’ve updated a bit as I do every year.

All “live” posts that follow these rules will start EMC World 2011:. This is to clearly identify them for everyone. If I write a post before/during/after the conference that doesn’t adhere to what I am laying-out here, it won’t have that prefix.

Disclaimers

I’m going to be running a basic disclaimer in all my posts. If for some reason I forget to paste it in, this disclaimer applies to all EMC World 2011: prefixed posts and you can be sure I’ll be adding the disclaimer as soon as I notice that it is missing.  This is because I will be writing the posts during/after sessions and I will hear things that I may misconstrue or that talk about future events.

All information in this post was gathered from the presenters and presentation. It does not reflect my opinion unless clearly indicated (Italics in parenthesis). Any errors are most likely from my misunderstanding a statement or imperfectly recording the information. Updates to correct information are reflected in red, but will not be otherwise indicated.

All statements about the future of EMC products and strategy are subject to change at any time due to a large variety of factors.

As indicated, if I learn later that something I posted was incorrect, I will endeavor to correct it, but it may not be immediate.

Continue reading →

CMS Tech Making IT’s Life Harder

5 Comments

I have some real, thoughtful, posts that I want to get out there. Okay, maybe only one. However, I don’t want to post them at the end of the week, so I am grabbing one of my rough draft articles to throw out for public ridicule and dissection.

This particular article is pretty raw, though I’ve smoothed a few rough edges. I’m posting it because one of the comments on my Preaching to the Content Management Choir post was from Steve Weisman who said,

I’ve said it for years and will say it again: the ECM industry’s greatest obstacle — never mind that it isn’t an “industry” at all — is psychology, not technology. Change management, organizational (mis)behavior, corporate culture etc. are all more in the way than the systems themselves, which all do work, more or less, pretty well. But only if you plan for and use them right — and therein lies the rub!

I think a lot of the reason that those are overlooked is because we lose time doing things that should be simple at this point. When schedules slip, the tasks aimed to deal with the psychological obstacles is cut.

So without further ado, the tech problem with a few inserted rants…

There has been a lot of talk of late in the great ether called the Content Management community about all of the different terms and systems. The focus has been both semantic and feature related. This debate is largely academic as a major challenge that a lot of companies are facing is the simplification of the operations and maintenance of a system.

Continue reading →

Tip: A Documentum Folder’s Existential Crisis

12 Comments

Sometimes you run across something and you figure, that won’t ever happen again.  Then it does, repeatedly.  You are then reminded of the fact that any random event is possible when presented with enough opportunities to occur.

Well, I’ve been living that world for a while and I think I got to the root of the problem, a bug in Documentum.  Not just any bug (or design constraint), but one that requires high-throughput and a little luck to reproduce.  The existence of a bug really isn’t the issue, all large systems have them.  It is the journey to discovery that is the “fun” part.

Continue reading →

Challenges to Collaboration Deployment

And you thought I wasn’t going to blog anymore…WRONG! Just getting practical. I’m also going to be dumping my half-crazed ramblings that I started writing but never got into a coherent state. This is the first of those. Enjoy…

There is a lot of uncertainty in the Information Management space these days. Is Case Management the future of Enterprise Content Management? How much will SharePoint 2010 impact the market? Where is all of this Enterprise 2.0 and Cloud hype going to take us? The one factor that has not changed is the need for people to collaborate online to get work done. The real question is, why is it sometimes so hard to deploy a collaborative solution?

Continue reading →

Preaching to the Content Management Choir

13 Comments

image Been doing some thinking and I’ve decided that my blog is worthless. I have been talking about things that I’ve covered before and things that practitioners in the industry pretty much take as a given. I occasionally manage to string things together in a new way, but very little is truly new at this point.

The reason why is fairly simple. As an industry, we are facing the same technical challenges that we faced when I started this blog. There are still no vendors that can readily solve those challenges today. There is a lot of promise out there, but promise isn’t something that I can take and implement for clients.

So what is the point of talking about all of this?

Continue reading →

Splintering of the Content Management Market

7 Comments

Life was so easy 10 years ago in this market. Web Content Management was simply publishing unless you were one of those companies doing business online. Enterprise Content Management wasn’t a reality, but we thought it was just waiting for the blending of the core technical capabilities. When it came to selecting a technology, it was a simple matter of matching capabilities with requirements.

Today, Web Content Management is much more complicated. ECM is more “challenging” than we thought it would be to execute. When it comes to selecting solutions, the traditional vendors usually can check every box but it is slightly more complicated. Do you want open source? Do you want to be in the cloud? These questions are frequently asked by users. Those questions have re-segregated the Content Management market.

None of this is really new, but let’s look at the impact to the consulting world.

Continue reading →

Take a Break from ECM

5 Comments

I have been trying to shift the topic away from “Enterprise” Content Management for a while now. I’ve said that it isn’t something you can buy because it is a strategy. I’ve said that you don’t need a single Content Management System (CMS) platform to implement your strategy. I even gave a presentation at AIIM where I said that the tech gets in the way.

I just read a great post by Lane Severson on the term ECM and the ongoing debates. In some ways he wants to get rid of the term and completely remove it from the dialog. He essentially calls ECM a vestigial term that no longer serves a purpose but is still around.

Well, I’m done. I’m not debating the term any more. It is what it is. What people are missing isn’t that the term is invalid. The problem is that there is a gap between our ability to execute and the “ideal” of ECM.

Continue reading →

Whitney is Leaving EMC…Why Not to Panic

2 Comments

So, if you missed it, Whitney Tidmarsh announced at the info360 AIIM Conference that she was leaving EMC. In fact, her last day was March 31. She quickly handed keynote duties over to Jeetu Patel who is taking her role and assuming the mantle of Chief Strategy Officer.

The first instinct is to panic at yet another person leaving EMC. My second instinct was to put myself into Whitney’s shoes for a minute. When I took that minute, this is what happened…

Continue reading →

Changes at info360, Yee Olde AIIM Conference

2 Comments

I have traditional gone to the annual AIIM conference, info360, in order to quiz/grill/annoy the vendors and network with people. The presentations were always secondary. After all, how many times can you see a presentation on the ROI of an invoice processing system?image

The last two years, I was there evangelizing CMIS to the community, but I basically skipped most of the sessions because they were the same thing as past years. Oh, Real Story Group was always there offering some honest insights, but most of the information the present you can get just by following them throughout the year (which you ought to be doing).

This year was different. The first difference was I was presenting something that clearly wasn’t a case study or CMIS. What made it better was that mine wasn’t the only presentation that was different. There were tracks on Mobile, Cloud, and Social Media. You couldn’t escape those terms this year but in previous years they weren’t barely present.

Continue reading →