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Am I Buying a WCM Solution or Stock?

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The Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management came out for the first time this month.  I say the first time because it was always a Market Scope before the 2009 report.  If you look at it, you can learn many things.  The one thing you won’t learn is if any of the products are right for you, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

Jon Marks did a good job of comparing Gartner’s and Forrester’s latest rankings and highlights how a “Niche Player” may be worth considering. CMS Watch has stronger words on the topic, talking about some of the differences between their methodology and Gartner’s.

I have a few of my own thoughts to add into the fray…

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The Future of Content Management

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About a week ago, Julian Wraith asked the ECM world what they thought the future of Content Management was.  He then said that he was going on vacation and would check back in a week.  So like all good techies, I waited until the end of the week before even starting on the task.  I did want to answer because I felt my ECM Definition needs a vision to where I see ECM taking us.image

Before I dive into the topic, I wanted to frame my answer.  I am backing off the term ECM 2.0.  As I think on it, the “2.0” is over-used, and doesn’t really apply directly to ECM.  ECM may support and be an important part of an Enterprise 2.0 system, but that can be achieved with old tech.  I am still ECM focused and see it changing, but slapping a version number is not the way to indicate the evolution of ECM.

The last thing about this future state is that it will not be here tomorrow. It is a future that is years away.  Some organizations may be there soon on a small scale, but the full-scale vision is a world where we are all there. So without further ado…

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Email, Part of this Nutritious Breakfast

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Last week I got into a discussion with a few people on Twitter about email as a collaboration system.  It started when I sent a foolish tweet:

RT @lehawes: Email is not a collaboration system!! It is a communication system.

People started getting riled up. Some solid points were made about people using it for collaboration, but my point was that people using email for collaboration doesn’t make it a collaboration system.  I collaborate using the phone, but it isn’t a collaboration system.

I decided that a post was needed to fully explain the difference as 140 characters is just too limiting.

Remember Sugar Cereals?

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The Evolving Enterprise 2.0 Revolution

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I’ve been observing and getting into a lot of discussions recently regarding Enterprise 2.0. This is probably because I was following the Twitter feed for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference last week. I have always liked the concept, 2.0 moniker aside, because I have always viewed it as the next step to realizing the goals in Knowledge Management.

One of the discussions is whether Enterprise 2.0 is evolutionary or revolutionary.  The simplest answer is yes. How others answer this question is most likely directly related to their belief in the importance of the technology in the equation of building Enterprise 2.0 success.

The Evolving Technology…

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ECM and Enterprise 2.0 – AIIM Throws Numbers on the Wall

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Enterprise 2.0 is a growing theme out there in the wild of the Internet. This is especially true in the world of ECM where vendors are looking to add all those “Web 2.0” features to their platforms. EMC, Open Text, and IBM are all releasing new “Enterprise 2.0” products. It is a smart play because people with ECM and collaboration tools are looking to their vendors to provide the newest Enterprise 2.0 features in the “next upgrade”.

AIIM saw this trend a while ago and did some research.  In May, AIIM updated their research. I was “lucky” enough (lucky being defined as someone who follows AIIM leaders on Twitter and clicks on links) to get an early copy of the results, AIIM Industry Watch: Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0, on Friday before the general announcement of availability. I thought I would share what I found.

Numbers, Numbers, Everywhere…

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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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Review: Alfresco Developer Guide [Part I]

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Alfresco Developer Guide Alfresco Developer Guide: Customizing Alfresco with actions, web scripts, web forms, workflows, and more

Jeff Potts

Okay, I know what your thinking, an Alfresco book review? Where did he find the time and what about Documentum? It is simple, I haven’t found the time. Not yet at least.  This is going to be a multi-post review. More on that in a few paragraphs.

As for Documentum, it isn’t going anywhere. Regardless of what I might say, especially when I critique EMC World, I like the product more than ever. However, as Tony Byrne of CMS Watch likes to say, Every ECM product is perfect for at least one organization [paraphrasing]. For some, the answer isn’t a traditional ECM vendor or SharePoint. For some, the answer is Open Source. It may be the right answer based on the organizations infrastructure or it is just a strategy decided upon by the CIO.

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CMIS, Beauty Is More Than Skin Deep

Kas Thomas wrote a post about how CMIS could be called DMIS as it is more for document management systems than content management systems. This hit me on two fronts. The first is with the concept of “CMS”.

Why is it that when I talk to people about “CMS”, they are almost always referring to Web Content Management? Seems to be a pretty narrow definition of the use of content. Along the same lines, many “Information Architects” that work with these “CMS” applications seem to be senior website designers. I’ve met Information Architects that I felt deserved the title, but they dealt with things beyond, though including, the web.  Enough of that, for now, on to the main course…

The second, is of course the slight to CMIS. That is the focus today. While I encourage criticism of CMIS as criticism is important for growth, I don’t want misconceptions to perpetuate themselves.

Sticks and Stones

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The Source Code from the AIIM iECM CMIS Demo

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I’ve been promising this for a while, but it is finally available.  I had all these plans, but I decided to just get the code out for everyone as I seem to keep getting busy.  You can tell that the code was written to work and not to be supported.  All you critics can relax, I know already.

Before I go any further, I want to thank Craig Randall for his sample application that helped me get started. That application is also available on the EDN as well. Read his write-up, Consuming CMIS WSDL in Visual Studio and then go to the EDN for his code.

I also want to thank Thomas Pole for helping to write the User Interface, design the object model,  and leading AIIM’s efforts around iECM and CMIS in general.  Some of the code you will see is his.

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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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