My Day Two thoughts will be coming up in a subsequent post. Right now, listening to Pierre-Yves Chevalier give some examples and demos of the Search Service in action. This is Marc Brette’s presentation, he apparently canceled at the last minute, so the Q&A may be a little weak (Pierre-Yves knows this stuff well from what I can tell).
DFS
EMC World 2008: Documentum Developer Tools and Web Services Community
Just had a great lunch with Andrew and then took a little perverse pleasure in dropping my boss off on him for a little grilling. Hopefully Andrew will still be talking to me later. Craig Randall and David Louie, the Composer product manager, are here to help with the dialog.
EMC World 2008: Documentum Architecture Deep Dive
This is, hopefully, a continuation of yesterdays architecture post. Let’s hope Victor Spivak remembers.
EMC World 2008: Documentum 6.5 Architecture Overview
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.
The Endless Security Cycle
I have been thinking about how to write this post for a while now. I have several approaches to choose from, but then I hit on the key concept. It doesn’t matter. Here is the general pattern of James’ approach to this topic.
- James will criticize ECM security as a whole and then point to one or more issues.
- I then attempt to explain why those key “issues” aren’t issues.
- James will then elaborate or comment on my post in one or more follow-ups, usually explaining something that I didn’t put in my post for one or more reasons. In the case in point, I didn’t take it deep enough. While doing this, he ignores any defenses I may have made of the “issues”. He invariably bringing up other “issues” as well.
Rather than continue the cycle, and eat my time up, I’m going to post one more time on this topic and move on for now. Some disclaimers of my own:
Conversational Collaboration at EMC
Thought I would let me next post on security in ECM percolate for another day and share something that Jed found. He found a second blog by Chuck Hollis chronicling EMC’s adoption of Social Media as an Enterprise 2.0 effort. The blog started in August, so I started reading there as Jed recommended. I’m going to chronicle my adventure through his blog.
These are posts that I found particularly insightful or useful. If you don’t have time to read the whole sequence, you can jump around.
- Why Me?: Chuck starts with a simple introduction to himself, explaining why he is leading the initiative and his initial strategy in getting started. My favorite line is, I had to informally recruit (hijack!) a few people who were as passionate on this topic as I was becoming, especially during the formative stages. Having recently started leading a few initiatives in my own company, I like the accurate portrayal. The key is to recruit those that will contribute, but may have been hesitant to volunteer due to various reasons. I’m trying to make sure that they get credit and rewarded for that work so they are still willing in the future.
Tips: Sizing a D6 System
As you may have noticed, there is no publicly available Sizing Spreadsheet for the newly released D6 yet. It is my understanding that they are still collecting data and refining it so that they have a high enough level of confidence to back it. However, I was able to get a draft copy recently and I wanted to share some observations.
Defending Enterprise Content Management
So the other evening, I was out at a Web Content Mavens gathering, and someone asked me what I meant when I talked about ECM. This person had years of experience in Web Content Management and a few years working with a leading ECM provider before returning to their roots in WCM. His basic premise was that ECM was a marketing ploy cooked up by the vendors, analysts, and consultants out there and that there is no rational reason to force them all into one system.
This was, at the same time, one of the best, and most painful, conversations I have had in quite a while. On the one hand, it is good to have to occasional defend your convictions in order to make sure that they are still on solid ground. On the other hand, sometimes you want to hit your head into a wall when someone doesn’t get it. However, I can see why that opinion exists. The vendors and analysts are to blame.
The ECM WSDL Discussion Leading to More
Tell everyone that you aren’t going to have time to write many entries and people start blogging about cool and interesting topics. Here is a quick rundown of the ECM WSDL analysis and my thoughts.
- Our old buddy James McGovern started the whole thing off. He has apparently been sharing is frustration with his significant other and he wrote a post on the sad state of WSDLs in the ECM space. They are ugly and poorly written in his experience. Not having delved into any out of the box WSDLs in ECM, I can hardly argue. It wouldn’t shock me though. Hopefully the DFS ones will measure up better. James then starts to talk about the ECM systems having a standard Document Query Language and a common WSDL built upon that structure. Sounds good to me. In fact, it is a nice, positive contribution to the whole ECM standards issue.
Fitting SharePoint into the ECM Picture
Previously I compared eRoom and SharePoint. I noted several basic features, but didn’t really say that either was dramatically better than the other. They are both solid collaboration options. That is the key here. SharePoint measures up well to eRoom because they are both the same thing. They are Content Rich Applications that focus on Collaboration. They are not ECM solutions. eRoom admits it. SharePoint doesn’t.
SharePoint doesn’t appear to deliver on its promises with its out-of-the-box functionality. As was predicted and then observed, SharePoint requires multiple third party components and other customizations to achieve its true potential. The core problem that comes from this approach is managing components from multiple sources.
Word of Pie 