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.
10 Things About Pie
Well, Kas Thomas stealth-tagged me with the 10-things meme. I did this just over a year ago, but I thought I would go ahead and reply with 10 things about me that aren’t ECM related. I wrote all ten of these without referring to my last list. The scary part, the last item is exactly the same.
- Dude! My father was career U.S. Navy and I spent most of my youth in Virginia Beach. I refer to people by “Dude” on a regular basis. If you hear me use that term, then you know I am out of “work mode” and pretty relaxed.
- War Eagle! I went to Auburn University down in Alabama. To say I am a rabid fan of the football, American, team is like saying the Sahara is going through a drought.
- Check. I love to play chess. I’m only okay. I can beat all but of my friends regularly (and he lives 700+ miles away). In the wider world of chess, I am, at best, adequate.
- Don’t touch that dial! While I was at Auburn, the Golden Eagle, Tiger, stayed in my apartment for one week until the management found out. She would watch the television and my roommate tilted the TV so she could see better.
- What’s in a name? The name Pie has nothing to do with food or the mathematical number pi. More I cannot say.
- Gooooaaallll!!! I watched every match of the 1994 World Cup. Keep in mind that I was taking a full slate of classes in college, had no VCR, and was living in Alabama at the time. Since then, aside from the one in Korea, I’ve seen a vast majority of matches in each World Cup.
- Play Ball!!! I love baseball. My favorite team is the Atlanta Braves and my favorite players are Dale Murphy, Hank Aaron, Lou Gehrig, and Tom Glavine.
- I am married with two boys. I want nothing more for them to be happy with their lives. Oh, and one of them going to Auburn would be pretty darn cool.
- I am intent on seeing the best 50 movies of all time. As nobody can agree, I have a list of 280+ movies, of which I have seen 89% and counting.
- When I grow up, I want to be a history professor.
I’m going to follow Kas’s lead and not directly tag people. I am going to hope to see Johnny and Lee add to this. I would have mentioned Jed, Jesse, Craig, Bex, or Billy, but as you can see, they have already gone through this particular exercise and given good answers.
Enjoy. My next post won’t be so list oriented. At least I can’t think why it would.
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 Annual Day of Celebration
Baseball’s Opening Day has historically been a day where I take off and watch the slate of games at a local bar with friends. This year, it falls on April 6th.
I want to mention this to everyone because this is one of the reasons I work hard. I like to do things with my family, and I like to enjoy my favorite, finer or not, things in life. For me, few days during the year match Opening Day. It is the one day of the year where people from all cross-sections of my life get together and enjoy one of my favorite things, Baseball.
Remember, no matter how hard you work, or what you do, always take time to relax with friends and family. This is why I do what I do.
So if you wander into a certain sports bar tomorrow and see somebody wearing a baseball jersey watching the game, don’t make any assumptions. Just take a moment to think about what things that you are able to enjoy because of what you do for a living.
Now, Play Ball!!!
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.
Should CMIS Impact Purchasing Now?
I was reading a post by Janus Boye with the provocative premise that customers shouldn’t worry about CMIS. As you can imagine, I was shocked. When I read the post, I saw that he had some valid points, but that his conclusion was only about half-right. As I started writing my response, I realized I was writing something entirely too long, so I brought it here.
Word of Pie 