CMIS

Why CMIS 1.1 Is Pretty Awesome

3 Comments

Before I get to the meat of this post, I want to start with a confession. I have been a slacker. If you look at my word cloud to the right, you’ll see CMIS as a big piece of the proverbial Pie. Even before it was a public term, I railed for the need for a standard in the Content Management space.

Now that the first update to the Content Management Interoperability Standard (CMIS) has been out for nearly three months, why am I just now blogging about it? Now that  browser binding, retention, holds, and type mutability have been added to CMIS, why am I not proclaiming the wonders of CMIS 1.1 from every rooftop.

I…uh…got busy.

What I want to do today is talk about why this update means everyone should be looking deeper into CMIS and reconsider it for every Content application created. In fact, as much as the need for standards in Content Management existed when I started writing about them, it is even more urgent today.

Continue reading →

Content, Security, and Standards

3 Comments

imageI am about to do what I stopped doing several years ago, start paying attention to James McGovern. Why? Because he is talking about several important issues that need to be dealt with in the industry.

Years ago, James and I discussed Security standards around Identity Management, primarily SAML. While my focus on the time was on Documentum, the issues were universal. Since we last interacted online, James has moved on to HP in an advisory role for clients.

Sadly, the issues we discussed are still prevalent in the industry. In fact, these issues are becoming more important with the advent of new players in the cloud space.

Sure, the new vendors support integrations and work with existing Active Directory installations. That’s nice. So did the established vendors. The problem remains, there is no standard way to pass both Authentication and Authorization.

Continue reading →

I’ve Been Doing This Four Years?

6 Comments

This year as I write my post observing my blog’s anniversary, I am hit with conflicting realizations. One is that I cannot believe that it has been four years already. It seems like only yesterday I wasn’t blogging and I was just another local hack consultant.

Now of course, I am a hack on a much larger scale.

The other thought process is that when I go to events it seems like I’ve been doing this forever. When I started this blog, blogging in the Documentum space was thin. There were some other Content Management bloggers, but it wasn’t nearly as widespread as it is now. It used to be that if you blogged about Content Management, you made the blog roll. Now things change so much the roll has been sitting half-way through a revision for several months.

I started during the days when Johnny Gee was the only widely known Documentum blogger. That does seem like forever and an ago. Over that time, the Word has come to define who I am in the industry.

So, who is this annoying hack known as Pie……..?

Continue reading →

Looking Ahead to CMIS 1.1

5 Comments

This week, over in Seattle, the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee is getting together for face-to-face meetings complete with plugfests every afternoon. It promises to be fun, but they are trying to accomplish some real work during all of this. The largest piece is the thought they are giving to what is going to be in the next version of CMIS.

Now I have some definite opinions which I am going to share. In order to facilitate disagreements, I am publishing the list of items they are taking under advisement. I have added bold to the ones that I care about the most.

Continue reading →

EMC Goes Mobile, Creating a Redundant Déjà Vu Experience

6 Comments

You know the guy: Ned Ryerson the insurance agent in Groundhog Day, One of the strangest things to happen at EMC World was the announcement by EMC of a mobile client for the iPad. It is scheduled to arrive in Q3 of 2011 (I made them commit to a specific Q3). Some people even said July 15, but I’d be more than happy with an arrival before Labor Day.

So why is that strange? Doesn’t everyone need a mobile client? Isn’t that a cornerstone of Choice Computing? Doesn’t Sarah, the new user, want access to information anywhere on every device. Well, you are correct on all fronts.

The strange part is that when you take a step back, you realize that the market is already addressing this need.

Continue reading →

EMC World 2011: Documentum Architecture Part 2

This is the second part of Jeroen’s Architecture series. The first half was fun, but this half promises to be more so as a live, crazy demo has been promised. This one is also covering the Next Generation Information Server (NGIS).

Continue reading →

EMC World 2011: Documentum Web Services Overview and Strategy

3 Comments

Ahson Ahmad and Norrie Quinn are starting things off this Momentum talking about the Web Services. Not expecting too much new, but you never know. Hopefully some good information on the REST interfaces.

Continue reading →

The Unspoken CMS SaaS Dilemma

6 Comments

This is the last of my “drafty” posts that I’m shoving out. This one was a lot more evolved. I do want to say that this post was inspired by a chat I had with Andrew Chapman at a conference a few months ago. This is the first of at least two posts. No promises if/when the next one will surface.

Once more into the abyss…

There is a lot of attention being paid to the up-and-coming cloud-based Content Management providers. The reason why is obvious, Content Management offered as a SaaS offering has the potential to solve many of the problems faced by the system integrators of today. There is the problem is that they don’t have the features required today and their ability to add all of those features is limited by their SaaS nature.

Continue reading →

Take a Break from ECM

5 Comments

I have been trying to shift the topic away from “Enterprise” Content Management for a while now. I’ve said that it isn’t something you can buy because it is a strategy. I’ve said that you don’t need a single Content Management System (CMS) platform to implement your strategy. I even gave a presentation at AIIM where I said that the tech gets in the way.

I just read a great post by Lane Severson on the term ECM and the ongoing debates. In some ways he wants to get rid of the term and completely remove it from the dialog. He essentially calls ECM a vestigial term that no longer serves a purpose but is still around.

Well, I’m done. I’m not debating the term any more. It is what it is. What people are missing isn’t that the term is invalid. The problem is that there is a gap between our ability to execute and the “ideal” of ECM.

Continue reading →

Looking to the Future of Content Management

10 Comments

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…

Continue reading →