Everyone seems to be making a looking back post and/or a predictions post. I thought I would throw one against the wall and see if it stuck.
Enjoy…
CMIS
Documentum Renewal: Focus on the Core
I just started writing a series on what EMC should do with their Documentum product as part of my Christmas gift to EMC. That part is key…this is a gift from the community because we want Documentum to be better and to stick around.
Why do I say the community? Simple enough…because I hear these things from many users at different installations across multiple verticals. I hear things from clients, partners, competitors, and random people at meetings.
We criticize because we care.
That being said, my first post in this series, on Application Separation, had a great reply from Lee Smith which is worth looking at. Take a moment.
Today we are looking at the Content Server, the engine that makes everything work.
Documentum Renewal: Application Separation
This is the first in a series that I am writing as a Christmas present to EMC. I want them to think about Documentum as a platform for the future and not on just adding on chunks that can be used to drive revenue. Revenue is important, but investment now means revenue in the future.
After all, if they want their vision of SkyNet to come true, they need to get to work.
Why Web Publisher Sucks
I talked recently about how there are many ECM vendors out there that have sub-par applications, like Web Publisher from Documentum, that shouldn’t be required to be an ECM vendor. It isn’t that they aren’t capable of writing good applications. It is that the landscape changes faster than the release cycles for the platform.
Redefining the Core Tech of ECM
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.
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.
Looking at CMIS 1.0, Thinking of 2.0
As you hopefully know by now, CMIS 1.0 was released for public comment thru December 22nd, and the excitement is building in the community and the press. If you haven’t looked at it, and want to provide feedback on the CMIS standard, the time is now.
For more information on what CMIS can do for you, here are some useful references, including three of my posts on the topic (newest first):
- Three Fundamental CMIS Use Cases: A slide-show introduction to CMIS and the types of business problems it is trying to solve.
- CMIS, Beauty is More Than Skin Deep: Addressing how CMIS is more than just what you see in the spec. With some creativity, CMIS can address more use cases than the creators set out to do in version 1.0.
- Vendor Support for CMIS: Here I talk about the importance of vendor support for the standard. So far, so good.
- The Gilbane Group, with the support of OASIS and several ECM vendors, has produced a Beacon report that is freely available from their website after you register. It is a pretty solid write-up of what CMIS is and what problems it solves.
- Advanced CMIS: Written by Florent Guillaume of Nuxeo, this write-up covers many of the concepts supported by CMIS beyond your Basic Content Services.
- Three Reasons to list CMIS in your Document Management RFP: The folks over at CMS Watch, specifically Alan Pelz-Sharpe, provide some insight as to why you should care about CMIS now, even if you are just getting started. Nice to see them agree with my assertions from March.
I’ve been looking at CMIS 1.0 from a functional perspective, along with some others in the community. If I want to solve business problem X using a CMIS-based application, what do I need? What would make things easier? Using my experience from building the AIIM iECM demo and many discussions with others in the industry, I’ve come up with a few things that I’d like to see CMIS support in 2.0.
Note the assumed nature of the next version of the spec. If there isn’t another version coming, then what is the point?
Nuxeo Comes Courting
This year, Nuxeo has been working pretty hard to increase awareness of their offering in the ECM marketplace. They have taken a prominent role in the Apache Chemistry implementation for CMIS and were one of three vendors, Alfresco and EMC being the other two, that were able to get a CMIS-ready repository up in time to support the AIIM CMIS demo for the conference this year.
Then came September when they hired Cheryl McKinnon to be their Chief Marketing Officer. Cheryl and I had both come from the world of PC DOCS and had worked for the same boss back in 1999 (she was in training and I was a consultant). Cheryl, knowing my love for all things ECM, offered to give my team and I a briefing on Nuxeo, complete with a demo by CEO Eric Barroca. I accepted the offer and was glad that I did…
A Tale of Two Documentum User Groups
In the last month, I attended two Documentum User Group meetings. They were very different experiences, beneficial in different ways. The NY group was fun and was a chance to talk to lots of different users
I am going to do something slightly different this post, I’m going to focus on the positives. Let’s see how that works.
Three Fundamental CMIS Use Cases
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.
What ECM Needs to be Today
A couple of weeks ago, I threw my vision of where I described the future of Content Management. I took it beyond ECM to Omnipresent Content Management (OCM for now). Lee Dallas then build upon that future by changing the very content that we generate and manage. The question still remaining is, what is ECM going to be today and over the next couple of years?
Last year, I threw out a new definition for ECM. I still think it applies, but the story around it has evolved. Here is that working definition of ECM.
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.
Let’s look at this definition in today’s light.
The Future of Content Management
About a week ago, Julian Wraith asked the ECM world what they thought the future of Content Management was. He then said that he was going on vacation and would check back in a week. So like all good techies, I waited until the end of the week before even starting on the task. I did want to answer because I felt my ECM Definition needs a vision to where I see ECM taking us.
Before I dive into the topic, I wanted to frame my answer. I am backing off the term ECM 2.0. As I think on it, the “2.0” is over-used, and doesn’t really apply directly to ECM. ECM may support and be an important part of an Enterprise 2.0 system, but that can be achieved with old tech. I am still ECM focused and see it changing, but slapping a version number is not the way to indicate the evolution of ECM.
The last thing about this future state is that it will not be here tomorrow. It is a future that is years away. Some organizations may be there soon on a small scale, but the full-scale vision is a world where we are all there. So without further ado…
Word of Pie 