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.
CMIS
How the iECM CMIS Demo for the AIIM Conference was Made
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…
Should CMIS Impact Purchasing Now?
I was reading a post by Janus Boye with the provocative premise that customers shouldn’t worry about CMIS. As you can imagine, I was shocked. When I read the post, I saw that he had some valid points, but that his conclusion was only about half-right. As I started writing my response, I realized I was writing something entirely too long, so I brought it here.
Update on the AIIM CMIS Demo
At the end of January, I talked about the proposed effort being undertaken by the iECM committee to create a CMIS demonstration for the AIIM Expo. Things are going well and I am working with others to build the demonstration. I wanted to share a few details with you.
- We are implementing the Web Service binding for CMIS. While REST would be better for what we are doing, it was felt that the Web Services binding would be easier for the development team to churn out.
- As a result of that, the participating vendors are Alfresco, EMC, IBM, and Nuxeo. Microsoft wanted to participate was not sure that their Web Services binding would be complete in time.
- Each vendor will have a two issues worth of articles from AIIM’s bi-monthly publication, Infonomics. In addition, each vendor is welcome to add their own white papers and collateral to the system.
- Users will search on metadata and/or full text. All searches will be round-robin sorted so that each repository has multiple hits on the first page, assuming that they have any content that meets the criteria.
- The system is being developed in .NET because we were able to identify a free hosting server that could support the effort.
- We, including myself, are going to be at the Expo on April 2nd to talk about it. I’ll share the exact time when I have it.
EMC World and Momentum
Love YouTube sometimes. I cached videos in the browser yesterday so I could watch it while I sit in a Starbucks getting my morning kick of caffeine (and watching the falling snow). The caching does tend to limit my desire to actually shutdown my laptop. Silly Windows Update keeps pinging me to restart (as if on cue, I click on Restart Later and typing continues).
Which videos am I looking at??? The keynotes from Momentum 2008 in Prague. I have been making plans to attend EMC World in May and I was looking back to see any changes from the last EMC World to that Momentum. More on EMC World later, but if you aren’t already making plans to attend, you need to get on the ball.
Answering James on CMIS
Back in December, James asked a few good questions regarding CMIS. I thought I would take a minute to answer them as best I could, with apologies for the delay. Any insight into making my answers more complete are welcome. I am only on the outside looking into the process.
CMIS and SharePoint
This is a critical subject. As I said when the CMIS standard was released, the key to its success will be vendor adoption. This means more than just signing off on the standard. The vendors have to incorporate it into their message and start to show clients, partners, and analysts how they plan to support and implement CMIS. Based on how the ECM marketplace has begun to revolve around SharePoint, I consider Microsoft’s support a major component for success. CMIS can succeed without them at first, but it will be a much steeper hill to climb without Microsoft.
Well, Microsoft appears to be doing things right so far. In addition to showing a desire to participate in the AIIM effort (along with EMC, Alfresco, IBM, and Nuxeo), they hosted the first OASIS CMIS Technical Committee meeting out in Redmond, WA. More important than either of those actions is the implications of this MSDN article, Integrating External Document Repositories with SharePoint Server 2007.
AIIM’s iECM Committee, Validating CMIS
As you may have heard, I’ve been a member of AIIM’s iECM committee for over a year. I’ve been more of a lurker as I was a little nonplused at the efforts of the committee, but I stayed with it to learn more about their efforts in detail and hoping to one day be able to help in a substantive way.
Well, that day has arrived. We are taking on the creation of a prototype, CMIS-based, system to store the presentation from the 2009 AIIM Expo. The basic premise is to have one or more CMIS back-end systems storing content with a central interface that would provide content, seamlessly, to users. Rather than explain the details, I’m publishing the “official” write-up.
Before you dive in, if you are a vendor with a CMIS implementation, we want to speak to you. You can contact me or the people listed below.
Gleanings from Momentum 2008 Europe
I didn’t attend Momentum 2008 Europe, which makes the umpteenth time in row that I haven’t attended, the inverse of my streak in the States. There were several people that did attend and I thought I would provide some basic thoughts and links for people. I will be asking questions, so if you know the answers, please leave a comment.
[Edit 19 Nov. 2008: Be sure to read the comments for more links and commentary.]
The Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management, 2008
[Updated 11/10/2008 in order to make Gartner, Inc. happier, or at least less angry.]
One thing about writing entries on public transportation, no Internet. This make is tough to refer to web sites that haven’t been opened and cached. As a result, today (I’m optimistic, so I’m not saying “this week”) brings you Gartner, Inc.’s 2008 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management review. Released on September 23, 2008, the biggest surprise was the number of vendors that didn’t hype it.
An important note from Gartner, Inc., Gartner advises readers not to compare the placement of vendors from last year to this year. With that in mind, since I’m human, here is a link to my post about last year’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management titled, The ECM Magic Quadrant, for reference.
Enter Open Source
Before we get to the chart, there are two big developments to take note of this year. The biggest is the inclusion of Alfresco. That’s right, an open source vendor has arrived. They are listed categorized as a niche player so far in this report. Considering limited, but growing, adoption and their evolving product, that is understandable. I think that their vision got dinged because they have been taking a stronger collaboration (read Enterprise 2.0) tack as of late, but that is just conjecture.
I think they may be selling Alfresco short, but marketplace adoption and confidence is a factor in this study. It will be interesting to see how the perception, and reality, evolves over the next year.
Other open source vendors will be slow in appearing here as Records Management is considered a core requirement to be in the chart report. I agree with this, but I may set the bar lower for compliance than Gartner, Inc. does as I think basic retention policies are all that is required.
Word of Pie 