AIIM

Changes at info360, Yee Olde AIIM Conference

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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.

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Looking to the Future of Content Management

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Last week, I had the privilege of presenting at the info360 Conference. My topic was The Future of Content Management, with the cheesy tagline of Cloudy with a Chance of Innovation. [I’m going to ramble a bit, the the slides are below].

This presentation was originally conceived when I was tired of not seeing a solid keynote/vision for the Content Management industry. The Web folk have a vision, even if they can’t agree upon a name for that vision. Wanting one, I wrote An ECM Keynote for 2010 last summer. I took that post and presented, Revisiting “Enterprise” Content Management in a 2.0 World at Gilbane this past fall. My presentation at AIIM was an updated version of that presentation.

What changed? A realization that began when I updated the presentation and crystallized at the conference. The thought was inspired by, of all people, Andrew Chapman and his posts on ECM as a Commodity. The question he asks is this…

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AIIM’s Future History of Content Management: A Social Business Revolution

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image As I discussed previously, AIIM teamed with Geoffrey Moore to map out the future of Content Management.  I was interested enough to attend the webinar on the topic to see what additional details I could glean.

Here are my notes from the webinar.  You can also download the presentation for details to blend with my notes [and my thoughts].

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Thinking on the Future of Content Management

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I’m sitting here reflecting upon a very productive Gilbane Conference in Boston this week.  It was good to talk to people and see what people were thinking about in the Content Management industry. Engagement, Search, and Social were big, overlapping themes in the conference.

I was at Gilbane in order present my view on the future of Content Management.  I thought I would share the slides here and talk a little about the recent research on the same topic from AIIM.

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ECM, Wanted Dead or Alive?

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image One thing that I have been meaning to do is to dive back into the state of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) as a useful term and the challenges facing its use. I’ve also been meaning to draw attention to some of the excellent posts in the new AIIM Communities. I am going to try and address both deficiencies today to some degree.

Let’s start with ECM, because that has been the point of my career for over a decade now. When we last saw it, I was talking about its future and how it is moving to becoming Omnipresent Content Management (OCM). While the term “Universal” is also apt, Oracle already stole it.

Before we get into more detail, and leave Steve McQueen, the question really is, Where does that leave ECM?

Content Management vs. ECM

Okay, this is the finale that Peter Monks has been waiting on, and baiting me about, for quite some time. Let’s hash it out.

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CMIS 2.0, The Next Generation

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image It has been a month since I talked about CMIS, and that was focused on celebrating the release of 1.0 and the AIIM Demo.  Well, the time has come to look to the future and start thinking what we need out of CMIS to help where we need it…the future.

Short List

I’m just throwing a list of business cases that we need support for in CMIS.  Specific features may not be all listed, but I will be listing some to give an idea.  The goal here is to stimulate everyone’s collective mind and think about what we need in the next version.

  • Semantic Support: I was working with some interested parties several months ago and realized that I could force many Semantic requirements into the current model.  What was missing was the ability to query off of relationships.  This will allow for more advanced relationship management.  Mind you, more support for that management directly off of the CMIS domain model would be nice as well.
  • Records Management: Right now, you can apply policies to a piece of content.  In theory, that policy could be a retention policy.  Some enhancements to policies might be nice in order to identify RM policies versus generic policies.
  • Support for Defined Data Models: One thing that was readily apparent when building the CMIS demo was the challenges in managing the same metadata model against different repository implementations of that model.  There were variations in naming and other details.  It would be a great advantage if I could query the repository to determine if they support the needed data model and then just use it.  This happens now when you use the field “cmis:id”. It maps to the real name underneath the hood which isn’t always “id”.  For example, “r_object_id” is the actual field name for “cmis:id” within Documentum.
  • Create Content Types: Component Content Application developers, this one is for you! Leveraging off of the previous item, it would be cool if you could, through CMIS, create a new object type based upon a document or folder.  This would allow custom applications to have a generic CMIS script that would create any custom types needed by the application.  This will add an important abstraction for those using CMIS for multi-repository purposes.
  • New Bindings: Heard several ideas in the last year.  WebDAV and JSON were two.  If I had to pick one, I’d lean to the latter for creating advanced apps, though WebDAV has the distinct advantage of working well with desktop applications.  The number of overall bindings is only limited by those working on them, so get involved if you want a new one.

I’m sure that there are more, but I think those are the important ones.  It helps the web-heads, the ECM types, and the solution providers.

More on CMIS Needs

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CMIS has Arrived, Demo Anyone?

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[picapp align=”right” wrap=”false” link=”term=finish+line+olympics&iid=1345446″ src=”e/3/3/a/Olympics_Day_8_e351.jpg?adImageId=12737081&imageId=1345446″ width=”380″ height=”262″ /]The news today?  CMIS is now an official standard! I’m pretty stoked about the whole thing.  When I started this blog, after I got through my initial list of topics, it was the desire for a SOA-based standard for ECM that provided the desire.  Now that my desire has been met, almost three years later, what will I do for inspiration?

Simple, push for CMIS 2.0! In all seriousness, that is a post for another day. I want to focus on the actual release of the standard and the Demo where you can see it in action.

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Exploring a Brave New World, HIMSS 2010

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image This is going to be a busy week for me.  I am off to HIMSS 2010 in Atlanta for a two primary reasons (and about a thousand secondary).  The first is to support my Healthcare colleagues from Washington Consulting at the conference.  The second, which will make the first all the more challenging, is to learn more about the vertical that is Healthcare IT.

Before I jump into it, a funny little joke.  When I was in a meeting and we were talking about the trip to HIMSS, someone mentioned HL7. Being one of many new terms to me, I didn’t ask them what it meant, just glanced at them with a curious look on my face.  They told me, and I kid you not, Look it up later. Just remember that there is no HL6 or 8.  Thanks for the help guys. ( I did learn what it was later and actually understood the “7” reference.)

Haven’t I Heard This Before?

So as I did research to get ready to hit the ground running, I saw a lot of challenges that the Healthcare industry is facing on the IT side.  I had heard most of it from a high level before in news reports and in Information Management/ECM case studies.  I had also picked some information up in planning for this year’s AIIM CMIS Demo.

When you strip out the names of the federal mandates and the acronyms that are common in the industry, I saw a lot words that I understood quite well:

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Let the Games Begin, The 2010 AIIM CMIS Demo

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As promised, here is the “official” announcement of what the iECM Committee is doing this year for CMIS demo at the AIIM Expo.  This year we are trying to create a reference application that we can actually use for a long time and grow with new functionality.

We are looking for participants to help us out.  Read through and see if you would like to contribute.  There is also be a formal presentation on the demo scheduled for the AIIM Conference, and there will most likely be a panel discussion like the one held last year.

Here we go.  I copied it here, but you can download the PDF version if you prefer.

“Mission Statement”

To analyze and evaluate the CMIS standard in terms of it usability and the benefits of employing CMIS in the development of new services and applications which leverage one or more existing ECM systems; and to develop experience reports that capture best practices in the use of CMIS and CMIS compliant products.

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The AIIM CMIS Demo: Looking Back at 2009 and Ahead to 2010

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I’ve published a lot on the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard since it’s initial public announcement in September of 2008.  One problem is that a lot of that content is spread out in multiple blog posts.

Demo Picture Well Thomas Pole, the AIIM iECM Committee chair, and I have written a whitepaper talking about the demo that the committee built for the AIIM Conference last year.  It talks about the ups and downs of designing and building the demo.  It classifies the demonstration using the three  fundamental CMIS use cases that I crafted this past summer and talks about what the upcoming demonstration is going to achieve.

If you want to read it, you can download the PDF version right here.

Did I mention that it has pretty pictures?

The section talking about the future is excerpted below.  There will be a more detailed post on that shortly.

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