D7

Documentum and the Search for Search

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Those of you that follow Documentum’s products know that search has been a bug-a-boo the last few years. When 5.3 was rolled-out, there was much promised around faster search.  It is here, but at a price.  Additional hardware is needed and the version of FAST used by Documentum isn’t VMWare safe. To be fair, dedicating a server to search is part of the reason we have better performance, but it hasn’t been the panacea that we wanted.

In 7.0, we are looking at the prospect of Lucene support for the more plug-and-play repositories, while the larger ones will still be able to leverage a larger, multi-node, FAST installation. (Works great! Seriously, I mean it.)  This is fine, but supporting two search engines, neither of which you actually own, is an issue for any vendor.

So what is the solution? Last week I read an article speculating on the prospect of EMC looking for a search company to add to their portfolio. Now the article was pure speculation, but that is what makes it fun.  Let’s see if it makes sense and who could EMC acquire.

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Old Documentum Architecture Habits are Hard to Break

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A while back, John Kominetz wrote a nice post on The Elephant and the Blind Man. I’ve been checking John out for a while and been looking for an excuse to link to his stuff for a while, but I always get sidetracked. Aside from his fun habit to reference Douglas Adams, he has been working with Documentum for a very long time. He has developed a healthy skepticism about the product.

In his post on the Elephant, John talks about the load of Junk DNA in Documentum. As the product has evolved over the last 15 years, things have been left behind and other things that worked, haven’t evolved. My recent post on the Audit Trail has led to a couple of posts addressing both of these aspects.

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The Future of Documentum Security in the SOA World

A month or so ago, I asked people to post questions that I would try and get answered at EMC World. Every question had to do with security. Unfortunately, I was unable to track down all the right people to ask the right questions in a timely fashion. Part of this was my fault as I didn’t keep on top of the questions that I had promised to get answered. There was one situation where I was told by person X that I needed to talk to person Y. The irony was that I had spend half an hour the previous night socializing with person Y, never realizing that I should ask that question and I never saw person Y again.

So if I don’t answer your question, I didn’t ask it and I am sorry. If it is any consolation, I didn’t get all of my questions answered either. So to Robin, no idea about the future of Common Criteria certification. James, I neglected to ask about about Ounce Labs and static code testing as a whole (whenever I remembered the question, I was invariably talking to a marketing person and not one of the product managers).

I would like to thank all the product managers for patiently letting me ask my questions repeatedly until we were sure that we were talking about the same thing. I also want to thank Craig Randall for all the time that he spent with me during the conference, and later via email. He was very helpful and worked with me to more fully understand my business scenarios. He successfully directed me to the correct product managers to give the scenarios to directly. Now I am bothering them, leaving Craig to talk about more relaxing topics (at least until my next hard question).

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Sailing with EMC’s Magellan

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I’ve been debating on whether to talk about Magellan or SharePoint next. It was a heck of a decision, but I quickly resolved it when I decided to do both. I pulled out my notes, did a little research, and remembered the disclaimer. This is unreleased software. Things may change before the Magellan Beta, much less the final release.

Shall we set sail…

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EMC World 2008: Introduction to EMC’s Next-Generation Knowledge Worker Client

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Finally, collaboration. David LeStrat, the manager of Magellan, will hopefully answer some of my questions.

  • The vision
    • Web 2.0 Client
    • Information Intelligence
    • Anywhere Access
    • Web 2.0 Platform

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EMC World 2008: Documentum Architecture Deep Dive

This is, hopefully, a continuation of yesterdays architecture post. Let’s hope Victor Spivak remembers.

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EMC World 2008: Documentum 6.5 Architecture Overview

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Time for an update on the architecture. Victor Spivak is presenting. He knows his stuff, so hopefully it’ll be a good one. I know waaay too many people in this room. I’ll never get to say hello to all of them. This is by far the most crowded session.

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The Federal Documentum User’s Group, November 2007

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So I spent a good chunk of today at the local Documentum User’s Group meeting. Formerly a regional/local group, it has been recast as the Federal EMC Content Management and Archiving User Group. This isn’t a major problem as it doesn’t seem to actually be federally focused. I encourage all local DC users to attend. It is a well organized event that is very useful. Of particular use is the local networking with other practitioners. This meeting focused on D6.

Before I get into that, I did get official notification that Howard Shao has rejoined EMC. I’ve known this for quite a while, but had to wait for official knowledge before I could share. This is a very good thing. There were concerns that the departure of too many founders/visionaries would hurt the Documentum product. Hopefully Howard’s return will restore faith and move things where they need to go. Howard is sharp and I am damn glad he is back.

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