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.
A couple months ago, Gartner released their annual ECM Magic Quadrant (which I looked at). Sure enough, being an odd year, Forrester released their ECM Wave. I see the pros of waiting two years as the larger vendors take that long, or longer, for a significant release. On the other hand, you have longer to wait for new members to show up.
Well not in Forrester’s world. Only one new vendor (HP) was added and a few were cut, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
I didn’t get to go to the SharePoint conference this year, or any other year for that matter, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t represented. My company sent three people, including Jed Carr, our SharePoint Solution Lead. After much cajoling, I convinced him to share his thoughts on the conference for everyone to enjoy.
So without further ado…here’s Jed.
Anytime you get a chance to go to Vegas, it usually turns out to be a good time. This trip, although work related, was no different…plus it was free. My company flew me out and put me up for this year’s SharePoint Conference. Overall, I thought Mandalay did a great job of managing the 7000+ attendees, most of which really wanted to be there. Also, to my surprise, I barely managed to miss a session. I thought there would be more down time, but every time a session ended, I usually found another one I didn’t want to miss.
[Note that my post on the 2010 Quadrant is now available.]
Thanks to the Documentum voters splitting their time between two topics, discussing the recent Gartner MQ for ECM is today’s topic. The voting was an interesting little diversion that I’ll revisit later.
I’m going to talk about the report here. The recent controversy around Gartner is a post for another day.
Last year I was threatened (my word) by Gartner for putting a copy of the MQ here. I was also chastised for several other nitpicks. So I will only link to Oracle’s courtesy copy of the 2009 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management this year to avoid wrath.
One thing to remember is Gartner really doesn’t want you to compare a vendor’s location in the MQ from year to year. That is both well-advised and unrealistic. To be fair, as the measurements and industry change, scores change. Movement isn’t just dependent on vendor action, or inaction.
However, we are human and we like to perform comparisons. I have a copy to perform the comparison for my own interest. The link I had online to last year’s report is no longer valid, so you’ll have to take my Word on it.
You may have missed it, but last week, Jean Marie Pascal posted an interview with me on his blog. It was a fun exercise, though it took a while as our schedules precluded quick email responses (my delay being the longer of the two). JM hung in there with me and the interview was finally completed.
If you have been missing the joy of reading fresh posts by me, then the interview will be a nice read. It covers ECM, Documentum, Open Source and a little about me. Share and Enjoy.
If you went and read the interview, you may have seen my comment on the definition of ECM. I criticized AIIM’s ECM definition as being tool centric. Bryant Duhon, the Infonomics editor, challenged me on this, saying that Strategy was definitely in the definition. I hadn’t responded previously because I knew this was a response. Well, here it is…
I was having drinks with Cheryl McKinnon when she was in town a couple weeks ago when we started talking about DOCS Open. I used to work for Hummingbird before I ever saw Documentum, so it was a walk down memory lane for us (Cheryl arrived at Open Text through Hummingbird).
It got me thinking about people’s first Content Management application. Like a first kiss, it always holds a special place in your heart. So today I am going to reminisce about my first Content Management application…DOCS Open 3.5.x.
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.
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.
I’ve been meaning to get this done for a while. Over the last year, I’ve run into people that saw a need for CMIS as a whole, but didn’t think that it mattered for them. Usually, the reason was that they only saw one use case for CMIS. Well, there are three fundamental use cases for CMIS, with multiple examples for each.
To facilitate understanding of the use cases, I have created a presentation which I have placed up on SlideShare. You can go directly to The Point Of The Content Interoperability Services (CMIS) Standard, or view the embedded version here and read the elaboration of the use cases below.
A couple of weeks ago, I threw my vision of where I described the future of Content Management. I took it beyond ECM to Omnipresent Content Management (OCM for now). Lee Dallas then build upon that future by changing the very content that we generate and manage. The question still remaining is, what is ECM going to be today and over the next couple of years?
Last year, I threw out a new definition for ECM. I still think it applies, but the story around it has evolved. Here is that working definition of ECM.
Enterprise Content Management is the empowerment of all content within an organization. This is accomplished through the centralized management of content, allowing for people and systems to access and manage content from within any business context using platform agnostic standards.
Let’s look at this definition in today’s light.
Word of Pie 