My Journey from DocApp to DAR

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A year ago, I tried Composer when my first project began to upgrade to D6. Without going into too much detail, it sucked. I loaded my DocApp and Composer completely rejected it.  After a couple of days, I gave up. If I had been creating a new application, maybe it would have been fine, but I wasn’t. After talking to David Louie, I sent the DocApp in question to EMC and got the report, “it works in the new version”. Well, it was too late and I wasn’t changing my developer’s environment mid-process.

Now that project is progressing down the D6.5 path. I thought I would try again, and document the process for everyone.

I’m writing this post “live”.  Which means I won’t post it live, but I won’t edit the post to disguise steps and my thoughts as I try things.

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Update on the AIIM CMIS Demo

At the end of January, I talked about the proposed effort being undertaken by the iECM committee to create a CMIS demonstration for the AIIM Expo. Things are going well and I am working with others to build the demonstration. I wanted to share a few details with you.

  • We are implementing the Web Service binding for CMIS. While REST would be better for what we are doing, it was felt that the Web Services binding would be easier for the development team to churn out.
  • As a result of that, the participating vendors are Alfresco, EMC, IBM, and Nuxeo. Microsoft wanted to participate was not sure that their Web Services binding would be complete in time.
  • Each vendor will have a two issues worth of articles from AIIM’s bi-monthly publication, Infonomics.  In addition, each vendor is welcome to add their own white papers and collateral to the system.
  • Users will search on metadata and/or full text. All searches will be round-robin sorted so that each repository has multiple hits on the first page, assuming that they have any content that meets the criteria.
  • The system is being developed in .NET because we were able to identify a free hosting server that could support the effort.
  • We, including myself, are going to be at the Expo on April 2nd to talk about it. I’ll share the exact time when I have it.

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The Importance of, and Lack of, Good Technical Support

So I have left my current post on Composer half written because I am frustrated and angry. Probably not the best time to write a post, but I want to share while I am motivated. The problem, tech support.

I only get involved in support cases these days if:

  • It is a complex issue that requires someone with deep knowledge to resolve. These that only applies to Documentum issues these days as there are better technical resources for everything else. I enjoy these cases because I learn something and they are a nice challenge.
  • An issue is languishing and no resolution is being reached. I hate these issues because it means that their has been a communication breakdown somewhere along the line and fixing it is never fun.

Before I dive in, I just want to say that I have dealt with many vendor support organizations over my career.  Except when I was in pure evaluation mode of a product, my experiences have been consistently poor on average.  Some good, some bad, but no large vendor has ever been consistently good.

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Pie Joins the Twitterati

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For those of you that have been paying attention, you already know that I created a Twitter account at the end of January.  I have some friends that have been pestering me to get on-board and check it out for a while. I always demurred, thinking it was micro-blogging and that since I had a blog, I didn’t need to invest the time.

Boy, did I blow that one.

After about a month of experimentation, I’m ready to report my thoughts, experiences, and urge all of you to join the discussion.

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Traditional Enterprise Search Meets E2.0

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So I was reading at Bex‘s post last week on Why Google Will Never be Good at Enterprise Search, and its great comments. I ended-up reading several posts out there in the blog sphere on the topic.  Search has been creeping up more and more in my daily work and I figure it isn’t a coincidence as trying to grab stuff from legacy systems or from multiple silos is challenging.  Heck, just trying to find things that some colleague created last year can be tricky.

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License Audits…Enforcing Ethics

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Ethics.  In the consulting business, the perception of your level of ethics can break you.  I haven’t seen a lot people gain work because of their perceived ethics, but I have seen several lose work.  We all like to assume that the person across the table, phone, or email will act in a fair and ethical manner.  The more “real” the social interaction, the stronger the assumption.

Well, recently it appears EMC has been checking on the usage of Documentum in some clients.  Specifically, they have been conducting audits to check that licensing agreements are being followed.  This revelation just screams for comment on the event and the underlying culture.

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EMC World and Momentum

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Love YouTube sometimes.  I cached videos in the browser yesterday so I could watch it while I sit in a Starbucks getting my morning kick of caffeine (and watching the falling snow).  The caching does tend to limit my desire to actually shutdown my laptop.  Silly Windows Update keeps pinging me to restart (as if on cue, I click on Restart Later and typing continues).

Which videos am I looking at???  The keynotes from Momentum 2008 in Prague. I have been making plans to attend EMC World in May and I was looking back to see any changes from the last EMC World to that Momentum.  More on EMC World later, but if you aren’t already making plans to attend, you need to get on the ball.

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Answering James on CMIS

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Back in December, James asked a few good questions regarding CMIS.  I thought I would take a minute to answer them as best I could, with apologies for the delay.  Any insight into making my answers more complete are welcome.  I am only on the outside looking into the process.

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CMIS and SharePoint

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This is a critical subject.  As I said when the CMIS standard was released, the key to its success will be vendor adoption.  This means more than just signing off on the standard.  The vendors have to incorporate it into their message and start to show clients, partners, and analysts how they plan to support and implement CMIS.  Based on how the ECM marketplace has begun to revolve around SharePoint, I consider Microsoft’s support a major component for success.  CMIS can succeed without them at first, but it will be a much steeper hill to climb without Microsoft.

Well, Microsoft appears to be doing things right so far.  In addition to showing a desire to participate in the AIIM effort (along with EMC, Alfresco, IBM, and Nuxeo), they hosted the first OASIS CMIS Technical Committee meeting out in Redmond, WA.  More important than either of those actions is the implications of this MSDN article, Integrating External Document Repositories with SharePoint Server 2007.

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The Domain of The Word

I have finally broken down and purchased a domain for my quaint little endeavor.  I am now at http://wordofpie.com.  No need to rush and change all of your links though.  The old links will redirect you appropriately.  This is sort of my way of dedicating myself more thoroughly to writing the Word.

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