Documentum

A Letter to EMC About Federations

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Dear EMC,

Hey there.  How are you doing? It was nice running into you at the AIIM Seminar last week.  I’ve been trying to tell people that CenterStage is not intended to take SharePoint out as we discussed.  People are listening, but only time will tell if it will matter.

I want to talk to you about an issue that I’ve been encountering.  I’ve talked to you about this before, but I’m not sure that you were paying attention.  I just wanted to mention it again to let you know that this is actually important.

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What Users Need from ECM Vendors

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A few weeks ago, I talked about the Future of Content Management and then a week ago I talked about What ECM Needs to be Today.  I wanted to continue the thought process and talk about what clients need from their ECM vendors today.  It isn’t just new features or learning how awesome they are compared to other vendors.  What most clients need is help getting the most from their system, today.  The twist is, the systems out there are almost never the latest version.

I’m going to use EMC and their Documentum suite as an example.  The needs of the users are the same across all products, so don’t assume that these needs are specific to EMC.

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EMC and Web Content Management

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I made a few observations the other week about the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management that came out recently.  I, and others, criticized what it was measuring (though one blogger defended the MQ). I made the following comment in my dissection:

Personally, I think EMC (Documentum) and IBM (FileNet) are Niche Players in the WCM world at best.  Why?  Their WCM products sell into a very specific niche, those companies that already have, or are making, investments in their EMC or IBM platforms. If you know of either product winning a pure WCM bid, let me know.

Well, no comments on them winning a bid.  Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, just means that people that know of such wins didn’t read the post or care to comment. My point still is that EMC’s, and IBM’s, WCM offering is not the “Challenger” as the MQ seems to suggest.

Let’s dig in a little.

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Stage 1 Complete, Documentum Helps Developers

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I’ve been meaning to talk about the new Documentum Developer Edition for a while now.  I’ve referred to it in previous posts and twittered about it.  More recently, Marko over at Big Men on Content has talked about the benefits of freely available ECM platforms for development and proof-of-concepts.  I thought some spare vacation time, and the release of the 6.5 sp2 version, was a perfect time to write-up my thoughts.

To start with, ABOUT TIME!!! Okay, that may be a little strong, but in the age of open source and when Microsoft and Oracle have been offering developer editions of their core products for years this was way overdue.  If you want the developer pool to grow, which is one of the major costs of a large-scale deployment, you need to allow them to use the tools.  There are lots of independent consultants out there that have trouble keeping-up with the technology because they can’t afford to become partners for the requisite fee.  The Developer Edition makes it easier on them (and harder on me, but that is another post) to deliver into the market.

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EMC Opens Their Eyes and Has a Vision

Went to the EMC Federal Forum yesterday here in Washington, DC.  I enjoy this event, if for no other reason than it is one of the few times a year that EMC people actually come to my town.  They’ve realized that it is easier to just talk to me than to try and avoid me, so it is now a truly fun and informative event.

The value of the breakouts were a mixed bag.  Many were similar to sessions from EMC World, which is perfect for this event as many users in the Federal Government could not make the trip to Orlando.  I did attend EMC World, so a lot of things weren’t exactly new.  I did Tweet some updates, and you can search #emcff for more tweets.  I decided to blog the keynote as it was focused on the EMC Strategy and Vision.

As you may recall, Vision was a problem at EMC World this year.  No Vision was really presented.  It was a nice description of things now, but Vision was lacking.  Rick Devenuti, the Sr. VP and COO of the CMA Division, has been tasked with sharing the “Vision” at this event.

I’m typed some notes as Rick talked and I have provided those at the bottom of the post.  Due to the content of the keynote, I’m providing a summary as well.  Keep in mind that this was a U.S. Federal Forum, so that market was the focus.

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Tips: Where Did the Time Go? D6 and the UTC Timestamp

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I had planned to start running all of my “Tips” posts in the EMC Developer Network, but I wanted to editorialize a little in this Tip, so I’ve decided to throw it up here.  This issue arose when I installed a new repository into an existing environment.  It is a documented issue, though the Support guys need to read that documentation a little more closely.

The Time Warp

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EMC World 2009, The Case of the Incredibly Shrinking Momentum

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This year was the second year where I “felt” that there were less Documentum sessions than the older traditional Momentum conferences.  This is strange as there are more components to Content Management and Archiving, Documentum, than there were even two years ago.  Luckily, I have the conference handbooks for the last three EMC World conferences and I can check numbers while I watch a new repository build.

The EMC World 2007 conference, while under EMC World’s wing, still felt like the session count wasn’t that far off.  I remember a few grumblings, but nothing documented, so I’ll just use that as a baseline with the understanding that the previous year was at least as good.  I believe 2007 was the year that the long-standing pre-conference tutorials vanished, so calling it even is a throwing EMC a bone.

Let’s See Some Numbers

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EMC and Mark Lewis’ Focus on Return on Information

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In my previous post, I shared a copy of Mark Lewis’ CMA keynote presentation from EMC World 2009. It made me realize that I needed to crank out this post on EMC’s vision and Mark Lewis’ delivery of that vision. This is going to be a little devoid of facts for a couple of reasons.  One is that the raw facts are captured in the presentation, SlideShare and YouTube, and in my notes. The second is that no vision was delivered at EMC World!!!

The Missing Vision

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Talking on CMIS at EMC World and Other Slides

In case you missed it, there were a lot of presentations last week at EMC World.  While most of the slides are only available to attendees, there are a few exceptions.  The first is my presentation.  Since I wrote part of it and was a co-presenter with Karin Ondricek of EMC, I was given permission to share it online.  I’m throwing it out there for everyone to see, especially as I didn’t take notes on my own presentation.

One thing that I always convey when I talk about the AIIM iECM demo, that isn’t on the slides, is that it took 1 hour to add Nuxeo to the Federated Search demo, and that was with declaring the CMIS Web Services manually within Visual Studio.  That took half an hour.  For more details on the demo source code a other valuable links, look at my previous post on the The Source Code from the AIIM iECM CMIS Demo.

Mark Lewis’ Keynote

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Documentum, So Close and Still So Far Away with SharePoint

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Apologies to Andrew on this post, but I’ve got to get everything out of my system before I learn anything new NDA items about the two products working together. I think EMC is moving in right direction on these products, but they aren’t there yet. That being said, their current approach is easily the best that I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lot.

Before you read this post, read my EMC World notes on SharePoint Repository Services and Content Services for SharePoint. That should help with the background.

Why SharePoint Repository Services Rocks

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