I read a post about searching from Bex Huff last week and I immediately felt that his post was worth sharing. If you haven’t read it yet, take a moment to do so now. I think he makes some good points and I want to build and not just repeat.
The ECM Magic Quadrant
[Updated 11/10/2008 in order to make Gartner, Inc. happier, or at least less angry.]
[Edit: See the newer The Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management, 2008 write-up.]
The latest version [This is the now old 2007 version] came out a couple weeks ago. There has been, and will continue to be, some criticism of the Gartner, Inc. methodology. For now, let’s set it aside and look focus on what the report says. While it may not cover all the vendors, and may not define “leader” in the same manner as others, the information inside can still prove useful.
Tips: Watch that Case
As most Documentum users and administrators will tell you, the login accounts for Documentum are case-sensitive. Regardless of source, LDAP or local, when logging into a Documentum system, you have to match. If the login name is DmAdmin, you have to type “DmAdmin”. If you type “dmadmin”, no matter how often you get the password correct, it will fail to authenticate you.
Retention Across the Enterprise
James McGovern, in responding to my previous post, brought up an interesting problem that I’d run across before, but hadn’t paid much attention to at the time. Not because we didn’t see the importance of the problem, but because we were several stages away from being able to even worry about it. When you don’t even have policies, getting into the nitty-gritty about implementing them across multiple systems from one control is not first on your list of concerns.
Records Management and ECM
James McGovern and Jesse Wilkins have recently been exchanging a few thoughts regarding Records Management. It has been an interesting discussion and it can be an educational read for those that are trying to learn more about Records Management. I thought I would look at what they had written and add my two cents.
Transparent ECM and SOA
Something happened recently that doesn’t happen too often. Two ECM vendors posted blog posts on similar topics. It definitely wasn’t intentional and they approached the topic from two different angles. However, it is worth noting and comment. The more interesting post, to me at least, was from EMC.
Little Bit of Everything
Recently I’ve had more to say than time. So I am taking some time while I watch a little football to comment on various topics. If I get any real feedback on any of these thoughts, I’ll spin it off as a separate post later…
Dialog about Dialog
Well, my post about more dialog got some great reactions. However, dialog about having a dialog isn’t the target. Jesse Wilkins did make an interesting point that people will talk about what interests them. He is exactly right. That is why we need more ECM bloggers. That way we have enough diversity to talk about any ECM topic. Of course, one of my goals is to get everyone to care about ECM standards.
I was very pleased by what I saw. Now let’s see what happens over the next few months as real topics surface.
SharePoint is Lotus Notes?
The ECM Blogsphere
Recently, James wrote expressing his concern that the ECM domain doesn’t seem to collaborate. His opening paragraph was straight to the point is not an entirely inaccurate picture of the ECM industry:
It is plagued by a plethora of disconnected products that don’t integrate well, no notion of patterns or detailed reference architectures or even a consistent definition for what the ECM even contains. There are no standards specific to ECM, none of the vendors collaborate and yet everyone seems comfortable with this fact.
In this one fact I would dispute is the fact that everyone seems comfortable with the status quo. That is both very true and false all at the same time.
EMC Making Some Moves
Taking a break from D6 to observe and rant about Documentum’s recent changes. They announced, buried in another press release, Thursday that Mark Lewis is taking over the Content Management and Archiving group and being presented with the title of President. I am mixed on this move as he replaces Mike DeCesare, one of the guys that helped Documentum grow. Of course, he was a sales guy, and Mark Lewis, the former head of Legato [Edit – 7 Sept 2007: He has been the Chief Development Officer and came from HP], is more technically savvy and may be a better choice to lead the CMA.
D6 Observations, Part I
This is a first of a sequence of posts of things that I notice as I downloaded the new release last night.
- Time to stop putting off those upgrades. D6 doesn’t support SQL Server 2000 any more. Your development boxes need to be upgraded as well since Windows 2000 is officially on the scrap pile. In general, not a lot of supported platforms. Upgrading your Content Server to 5.3 sp5 as an intermediate step in order to upgrade all your 3rd party components may have just gone from being a good idea to a required step.
- Content Server still C++ has for the application. Fabian was correct. The DMCL API, the old C++ foundation for all applications, is now part of the Java DFC. A copy of the DMCL will still be provided for legacy support, but no new features are to be provided.
Word of Pie 