e-Discovery

Records Management and the Cloud

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imageIt should be obvious to you if you’ve spent any time on this blog that I firmly believe the cloud is the future. It solves so many of the stumbling blocks and time consuming tasks that people face during implementations and ongoing growth that it is silly to think of a different future in the face of overwhelming volumes of information.

Still, things aren’t perfect in the world of the cloud. As of this writing, there is no system with solid Records Management (RM) capabilities. Sure, some older vendors offer hosted solutions but those aren’t cloud solutions, merely hosted.

The reason for this is two-fold. The first is that the current crop of cloud vendors are growing fairly quickly without RM features. The second, the calling card of vendors like Box is simplicity and Records Management is traditionally not simple.

The first reason is going to fade over the next couple of years. Before that happens, how do cloud vendors address the second issue? How do they make it simple for the users?

By changing the equation.

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The EMC Writer’s Summit, 2010 Style

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For those that are unaware, EMC hosts writers in the Content Management space for a 1-day gabfest about once a year.  Last week was the third one, so I guess we can officially call it annual.  This is an invite only event with some of the expenses paid.  That may lead you to wonder about what was discussed and if it was biased…

Well, it wasn’t biased or tilted at all.  First of all, kudos to EMC for inviting me.  I wasn’t the nicest person on the block after EMC World, but they still went out of their way to make sure that I was able to attend.  Their were no conditions placed upon me, and my degree of rabble-rousing was left to my own discretion.

The best part was that aside from a short intro by EMCs Whitney Tidmarsh on “Why IIG” and the changes taking place within IIG, there was no EMC focused topics or discussions.  There were some EMC opinions put out there, but they were contributions and not dictates.

All-in-all, it was a great event that spurred some great discussions and debates.  I’ll be talking on some of the topics over the next week or so here.

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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.

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SourceOne, EMC’s Worst Guarded Secret Arrives

For months, upon months, I’ve been hearing about SourceOne. Multiple friends at EMC occasionally let the name drop, while others would talk about something coming up and I would say, You mean SourceOne? I eventually learned what it was, but I had to be quiet.  I told some clients, soon EMC will have an nice eDiscovery option for you, but in the meantime, these are your choices.

When I was up at AIIM, they made the announcement, held a fancy webcast or two, and posted material for all to see. Was it worth the wait?

What the Heck is SourceOne?

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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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Forecasting the Future of Documentum and SharePoint

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I look at the numbers.  I know that I get a bump in readership just by using the workword SharePoint.  It also happens to be a vital issue to the Documentum world.  Aside from the future of CenterStage vs. SharePoint, which is a non-starter until we see a non-beta CenterStage, there is this simple fact.  People are adopting SharePoint and are looking for help more and more often.  This can be in the way of services, but can also be from and enhanced architecture created with the help of Documentum.

Well, we’ve been patient, and Andrew has begun to share some of his thinking with us.  Andrew Chapman is a great person and lets his sense of humor show in his blog.  If you don’t find it funny, you are doomed in the ECM world.  If there is any field that requires a sense of humor, it is ECM.

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