Tower Falls to HP

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A couple of weeks ago, the Big Men were speculating on potential buyers for OpenText. I opined that maybe HP would be looking to enter the market to compete with EMC. It was a brilliant piece of insight for all the wrong reasons. Right buyer, wrong target.

Turns out that HP has decided to buy their way into the market, but only with a single product, Tower Software. Like EMC, HP is looking to broaden their Information Management offering by adding Records Management and eDiscovery. If that is all they were looking to add, then buy Tower was a great move. I have always heard good things about their software for those purposes, though I always had doubts as to their complete ECM capability.

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Opening Day, My Favorite Holiday

Yesterday, I created many headaches.  I took the day off and went to a sports bar and watched several hours of baseball, including the thumping of the Phillies by the Nationals.  Now, many of you may not care about baseball, or even know the rules.  That isn’t important.  What is important is the time.

I used a day of vacation to sit back and do “nothing”.  My dad and a few of my friends showed up during the afternoon, and we talked baseball, work, and whatever came to mind.  As tradition dictates, I bought each of my friends a beverage and an appetizer to thank them for taking time away from work, and their families, to hand out and watch baseball.

I do this every year, for one very important reason.  I enjoy work, but I work to live, not the other way around.  The Opening Day of MLB baseball is something that I enjoy and I force every project/employer to realize that while I may not be working that day, my productivity rises because I am in such a chipper mood for weeks before and days after.  This is opposed to the crotchety mood that I would have if I had to actually work.

I urge everyone to take a moment and think about why you work.  What do you love to do?  Whatever it is, be sure to make time for it.  It may seem a little unconventional to some, but mental health is just as important than your physical health.

Now, back to the fun world of ECM…

SharePoint for Web Content Management, The Movie

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A month ago I invited people to attend the Washington, DC Web Content Mavens meeting for March to hear a Microsoft partner explain how SharePoint could be used for Web Content Management. Well, that day was yesterday then you missed a great presentation.

Before I dive in, I want to thank Rob Garrett of Portal Solutions, LLC for answering my questions and being, or at least appearing, honest regarding the ability of SharePoint to provide Web Content Management. He shared areas that weren’t perfect and agreed with me on some of the limitation issues with SharePoint when dealing with large enterprises. If I had to deploy a public facing website with SharePoint, I’d bring him on board to help out.

Of course, I’d probably never use SharePoint for such a purpose.

The Architecture and Features

To use SharePoint for a website, you need the full featured Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) and not the free SharePoint Services. In general you would setup a SharePoint Farm, consisting of one database server/cluster, multiple SharePoint/Web servers, and some sort of load balancer in the front.

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When Trust Breaks Down

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I wrote a while back on how Trust is Important. Recently, there was an incident at the State Department where the Passport records of the Presidential candidates were accessed. I think this is another opportunity to look at trust in the IT world.

Before I dive in, let me just state that I don’t know anyone involved and don’t have any connection to the incident. I don’t have any inside information and only know what I have read in the papers. I do have knowledge and experience on a project of similar scope and privacy concerns for another governmental agency. As such, I am familiar with the issues and environment involved.

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ECM Job Security

I lot of things have fallen through the cracks the last few weeks while I have been busy with family and work obligations. One of those was mentioning the updated version of The Expanding Digital Universe. CMS Watch helped remind me when I was catching up on their posts.

This report, written by IDC and commissioned by EMC, basically says that there is more information out there than we thought and that it is being created at a faster pace than estimated. The amount of information from 2006 to 2011 will increase by a scale of magnitude. At that rate, by my calculations, we’ll hit 1 Yottabyte around the year 2025.

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ECM: A Working Definition for the Next Generation

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A while back I talked about how the current definitions of Enterprise Content Management left a lot to be desired. They don’t accurately describe the reality of what ECM systems need to accomplish in today’s environment. They are also boring and lack a soul.

I have come back to this topic through multiple avenues. One is the concept of Invisible ECM from Billy and crew over at Oracle. It resonated very strongly with my previous discussions on Transparent ECM. We can debate terminology later, but what is important now is the shared concept.

A second avenue comes from my need to explain where ECM is going, ECM 2.0, in a simple and concise way. I can explain it and speak passionately on the topic. The need to get the concept out there in one breath has become more important as I talk to more people.

I have developed a proposed definition for your consideration. I would love feedback. I will approve all constructive comments for sharing, though I may not respond until a subsequent post. I’ll throw it out there and then discuss it briefly. Remember, I want this definition to have a soul.

Enterprise Content Management is the empowerment of all content within an organization. This is accomplished through the centralized management of content, allowing for people and systems to access and manage content from within any business context using platform agnostic standards.

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Online Games and Enterprise Applications

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James posted on this topic after watching a presentation at OWASP’s local Hartford chapter meeting last week. It was buried halfway down in the post, but it asked a great question:

Do they really think that their silly little architectures that support 500 users concurrently is somehow more challenging than implementing an architecture that supports 2 million concurrent?

It is a damn good point. The playground for these applications is different, but the same issues arise. I’ve played a few online games in my day and have seen the ups and downs of their implementations. I think I’ll throw in my opinion on two of the items for comparison, performance and security.

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Social Media and Knowledge Management

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Run for the hills! I just dragged the on again, off again, term of the year, Knowledge Management (KM). For those of you newer to the space, KM has made an appearance every few years and then been torn apart by end-users as the latest KM solution failed to live-up to its promise.

Well, KM is back, but under a disguise. Enterprise 2.0, using the Social Media on Web 2.0 in the business world, enables Knowledge Management. When I took my adventure through Chuck’s Journey, it was like a light bulb clicking on in my head. All of this Social Media tech solves some of the key issues that have plagued KM systems.

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SharePoint for Web Content Management

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Before continuing, I’ll pause to let the laughter die down. Done yet? Don’t worry, I’ll wait…

Seriously, Microsoft continues to push SharePoint 2007 for Web Content Management. I’m sure it can be done, but it seems a bad fit. SharePoint’s primary weakness, in my opinion, is the inability to scale for the large Enterprise. Now imagine managing a large website. There are two options here:

  1. Host on SharePoint. Bad. Beyond bad. The security and scalability issues are challenging on a good day.
  2. Store an manage on SharePoint and publish out. Definitely not out-of-the-box. At a minimum, a WCM system should be able to handle this.

It appears that I’m not the only person that thinks that SharePoint isn’t a good fit for WCM. Janus Boye over at CMS Watch shared a couple of stories from some Danish companies that wanted to use SharePoint for WCM. They couldn’t find anyone that would do is for them, and one of them even asked Microsoft directly. The closest they got was one that offered to do it on SharePoint 2003!

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Open Source vs. Open Source

I went to the monthly meeting of the Web Content Mavens last night. They were featuring a panel speaking on about 7 different Open Source Web Content Management systems. Some of the vendors present, like Alfresco, do more than web content, but web content was the focus. It was moderately interesting. I would have loved to see more interaction among the panelists, but it was good to hear their spin on what they each do best and to talk with them afterwards.

Before I say anything else, the highlight for me was when one of the panelist, a primary contributor to DotNetNuke, Antonio Chagoury, said,

You get what you pay for.

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