AIIM

The AIIM iECM CMIS Demo, 2010 Remix

Last year, AIIM‘s iECM Committee put together a demonstration of the proposed CMIS 1.0 standard for the AIIM Conference in Philly.  Well, we are at it again for a bigger and better demo.

How is it going to be better?  I am glad you asked.  Here is what we are aiming for this year:

  • More vendors:  Last year we had three vendors (Alfresco, EMC, and Nuxeo) participating.  This year we already have four vendor commitments and we haven’t started groveling for more participants yet!
  • More CMIS scenarios:  Last year we only showed CMIS in the Federation scenario.  This year we are going to be showing TWO Federation scenarios AND, as a bonus, an Application to Repository scenario.  That’s right, we are going to be switching our front-end application between the different repositories ON THE FLY!
  • Real-world use cases: Okay, maybe not “real” world, but we are going to be using the Health Care Industry as a basis for this year’s demonstration.  Our meta-data model and use cases will focus on the management of content of a patients health care record.  Things will be simplified, this is a CMIS demo after-all, but you will be able to see a real-world application for CMIS that doesn’t involve a generic ECM interface.
  • CMIS Version 1.0: This is really just for me.  Last year everything was draft this and beta that.  I’m expecting a much more streamlined development process this year.

You want more?  How about this…there is going to be a session on the demo at the AIIM Conference this year presented by myself and Thomas Pole, the iECM Committee Chair talking about the demo and a whitepaper that will be developed in conjunction.

In the next few days, you will see a more detailed description of this year’s demonstration and a whitepaper that Thomas and I have written about the status of the standard, the story of last year’s demo, and what we are planning for this year.

Exciting times people, exciting times.

Redefining the Core Tech of ECM

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For several months, I’ve been tinkering with an idea in my head.  I’ve watched as EMC and other large ECM vendors fell further behind in the WCM space.  For every advancement that has been made, there were losses to the market.  It is at the point that if you aren’t deploying massive websites to server farms, you wouldn’t even look at the larger vendors.image

And yet, nothing changes.  The large vendors keep taking one step for every two that the market makes.  I think there will be a change, and CMS Watch, in their excellent 2010 Predictions, made a prediction similar to my thought process:

1) Enterprise Content Management and Document Management will go their separate ways

When you read the description, it is clear that they are seeing the same things, but they appear to be throwing the emphasis in the wrong direction.

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JM Pascal Asks Pie the Hard ECM Questions

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You may have missed it, but last week, Jean Marie Pascal posted an interview with me on his blog.  It was a fun exercise, though it took a while as our schedules precluded quick email responses (my delay being the longer of the two).  JM hung in there with me and the interview was finally completed.

If you have been missing the joy of reading fresh posts by me, then the interview will be a nice read.  It covers ECM, Documentum, Open Source and a little about me.  Share and Enjoy.

This Little ECM Definition Comment

If you went and read the interview, you may have seen my comment on the definition of ECM.  I criticized AIIM’s ECM definition as being tool centric. Bryant Duhon, the Infonomics editor, challenged me on this, saying that Strategy was definitely in the definition. I hadn’t responded previously because I knew this was a response.  Well, here it is…

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Three Fundamental CMIS Use Cases

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I’ve been meaning to get this done for a while.  Over the last year, I’ve run into people that saw a need for CMIS as a whole, but didn’t think that it mattered for them.  Usually, the reason was that they only saw one use case for CMIS.  Well, there are three fundamental use cases for CMIS, with multiple examples for each.

To facilitate understanding of the use cases, I have created a presentation which I have placed up on SlideShare.  You can go directly to The Point Of The Content Interoperability Services (CMIS) Standard, or view the embedded version here and read the elaboration of the use cases below.

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ECM and Enterprise 2.0 – AIIM Throws Numbers on the Wall

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Enterprise 2.0 is a growing theme out there in the wild of the Internet. This is especially true in the world of ECM where vendors are looking to add all those “Web 2.0” features to their platforms. EMC, Open Text, and IBM are all releasing new “Enterprise 2.0” products. It is a smart play because people with ECM and collaboration tools are looking to their vendors to provide the newest Enterprise 2.0 features in the “next upgrade”.

AIIM saw this trend a while ago and did some research.  In May, AIIM updated their research. I was “lucky” enough (lucky being defined as someone who follows AIIM leaders on Twitter and clicks on links) to get an early copy of the results, AIIM Industry Watch: Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0, on Friday before the general announcement of availability. I thought I would share what I found.

Numbers, Numbers, Everywhere…

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Talking on CMIS at EMC World and Other Slides

In case you missed it, there were a lot of presentations last week at EMC World.  While most of the slides are only available to attendees, there are a few exceptions.  The first is my presentation.  Since I wrote part of it and was a co-presenter with Karin Ondricek of EMC, I was given permission to share it online.  I’m throwing it out there for everyone to see, especially as I didn’t take notes on my own presentation.

One thing that I always convey when I talk about the AIIM iECM demo, that isn’t on the slides, is that it took 1 hour to add Nuxeo to the Federated Search demo, and that was with declaring the CMIS Web Services manually within Visual Studio.  That took half an hour.  For more details on the demo source code a other valuable links, look at my previous post on the The Source Code from the AIIM iECM CMIS Demo.

Mark Lewis’ Keynote

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The Source Code from the AIIM iECM CMIS Demo

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I’ve been promising this for a while, but it is finally available.  I had all these plans, but I decided to just get the code out for everyone as I seem to keep getting busy.  You can tell that the code was written to work and not to be supported.  All you critics can relax, I know already.

Before I go any further, I want to thank Craig Randall for his sample application that helped me get started. That application is also available on the EDN as well. Read his write-up, Consuming CMIS WSDL in Visual Studio and then go to the EDN for his code.

I also want to thank Thomas Pole for helping to write the User Interface, design the object model,  and leading AIIM’s efforts around iECM and CMIS in general.  Some of the code you will see is his.

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How CMIS Made Me Re-Visit Visual Studio

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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.

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My Day at AIIM Expo 2009 with CMIS

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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.

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How the iECM CMIS Demo for the AIIM Conference was Made

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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…

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