EMC

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, Looking Back on EMC World 2009

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It has been a busy week.  I think each year my schedule get crazier and crazier while I am here at the conference.  As a result, I notice things that make it both easier, and more difficult, for me to accomplish everything that I set out to accomplish at the conference.  While it is all still fresh, and I wait for my ride, I want to share some thoughts on the conference.

Before I dive in, I want to say that I recognize that EMC has listened and tried to make the conference better for the Content Management professional. I appreciate the efforts and I hope that they continue to listen to the feedback.  No conference is perfect, but they should strive for perfection.

I shared, and gathered, these thoughts with people from EMC employees, partners, and customers.  This is a conference evaluation, not on the strategy or direction of EMC.  That will come later. Check my EMC World page for all my links.

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Tip: Federations and Replicating LDAP Definitions

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This was going to be part of my post, Documentum and LDAP, Time to Grow Up, but I decided to pull it out as a short post in the Tips section.  Partly because I haven’t posted a Tip in a while, and partly because I think this deserves a little more attention.

The issue? A Federation and multiple LDAP definitions. The solution, simple, but poorly documented.

The Heart of the Matter

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Documentum and LDAP, Time to Grow Up

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[Edit: See Comments for details on the “Why” of the edits.]

I’ve spent the last several weeks working on LDAP issues.  Some have been simple, others, not so much.  Suffice it to say, if you have Documentum 6.0 sp1, get the hot fixes for LDAP.  They are readily available from EMC.  Most of these are rolled up into D6.5 sp1.

Those issues aren’t isn’t what I want to talk about today. What I want to talk about is the advent of large systems and the need for applications, like Documentum, to accommodate the broader reality of some of today’s environments.

Before I go much deeper, I want to state that some vendors handle this worse than EMC, and some handle it better.  I’m not going to name names.  I do know at least one major player that does a much worse job, and I am pretty sure I can accurately pick one that handles it better.

ALL vendors need to understand this problem.

Enter the Multi-Domain Enterprise

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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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EMC World Orlando, 2009 Edition

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Well, I finally broke down and registered for EMC World.  This year it is May 18-22 in Orlando. I got my hotel reservations months ago and wasn’t in a rush for the actual registration as the price has yet to change. I don’t need a free gift for registering early. In this economy, it is all about the Benjamins and the impact on the balance sheet, so no discount, no early registration push.

I was thinking about talking about my plans for EMC World, which looks pretty good, but the I realized something…This will be my 10th Documentum User Conference!  So I have decided to flash back a bit to the previous conferences.

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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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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.

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License Audits…Enforcing Ethics

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Ethics.  In the consulting business, the perception of your level of ethics can break you.  I haven’t seen a lot people gain work because of their perceived ethics, but I have seen several lose work.  We all like to assume that the person across the table, phone, or email will act in a fair and ethical manner.  The more “real” the social interaction, the stronger the assumption.

Well, recently it appears EMC has been checking on the usage of Documentum in some clients.  Specifically, they have been conducting audits to check that licensing agreements are being followed.  This revelation just screams for comment on the event and the underlying culture.

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Answering James on CMIS

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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.

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CMIS and SharePoint

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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.

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