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Haiku-ing Off to BoxWorks

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image Last month I was offered a chance to attend Box’s “customer” conference, BoxWorks, later this month in San Francisco. After watching the agenda grow more and more interesting, and making sure my work schedule would permit, I finally agreed to accept the offer. One not-so-minor detail, Box was the one offering to pay my way.

I’m not (that) stupid to know that this is purely from the kindness of their collective hearts. While I have used Box when I needed to collaborate on things for AIIM and other efforts, I’m not what you would consider a key client. What I am is a vocal (loud-mouthed) Content Management rabble-rouser that has said positive things about Box in the past. No strings or conditions were placed on my attendance but I know that Box wants me to talk about the conference, thus raising awareness. I’ll discuss the impact of that in more detail later in the post.

First, I have something to offer you.

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Don’t Discount the Cloud Guys

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Was going to have a multi-rant post, but I’ve decided to slice and dice. I thought I would start with a warning for all the Content Management vendors.

Never discount the cloud guys. They are dangerous. Today they may just be file-sharing or basic document management but tomorrow they’ll be the de facto cloud content repository. As fast as you think you are moving, they are moving faster.

Those flying cloud monkeys have no problem throwing new features up there at a pace that will make your head spin just to see what sticks. They don’t need to make a profit today as they are working to make profit in the future. The source of that profit? Money that is now going to all the other content providers.

How do you beat them? Simple, fix your pricing structure to a metered/usage approach and move to a secure cloud, now. Older vendors know the market better, so if they get the architecture figured out fast enough, they can take the cloud monkeys down.

Oh, and fix that user interface and work on a mobile strategy. Both of these can be handled with agile development processes that you can use to match the cloud guys.

Yes, the cloud guys aren’t there yet, but they are driving a Veyron.

Crazy Uncle Owen Loses a Friend

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For years, I’ve had a crazy uncle, Owen Tedford. Now crazy Uncle Owen always like to collect baseball cards. I’ve always liked baseball cards so I always like to visit with Owen for short periods of time.

We always considered him eccentric and not crazy until he started buying other collections. While that wasn’t crazy in and of itself, it was what he did, or didn’t do, with the cards. He wouldn’t look at the collection for overlap before buying it. He would see one or two cards that he didn’t have and just buy.

Once uncle Owen got the collection, he would put the new collection in his shed and slowly cull it for individual cards to add to his main collection. The leftover parts of the collections slowly deteriorating outside in the shed.

We were worried about crazy Uncle Owen being crushed by his rotting collection of cards on a trip to the shed. We figured it was only a few more years until the sheer dead weight of it all collapsed. Then he met Artie, the town loon.

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Folders, A Nutritious Part of Your Content Management Diet

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Sean Hederman of Signate Document Management wrote a rebuttal of  my AIIM article defending folders. He admits a bias as he works for a Document Management vendor built around search. I thought of writing a short response saying that he missed the point of my article and that he had nothing to rebut, but where is the fun in that?

My article was itself a rebuttal against an AIIM article saying we should get rid of folders by Chris Riley. I never meant to imply that we should get rid of search, only that we shouldn’t get rid of folders. I like search, and metadata for that matter. I complain vocally when search doesn’t work well.

With that in mind, here are his points. Each heading is a direct quote of a heading from his post.

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Oracle Buys FatWire, Now What?

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If you missed it, Oracle bought FatWire yesterday. Whether or not this was a shock depends on who you ask. In fact, I suspect that the tension of the sale has been rippling though events for several months.

This acquisition raises several questions, such as, does anyone care, that is, outside of the FatWire install base and those competing against FatWire? I think it matters. Not because of the actual purchase, but because of what Oracle does with FatWire. That will show us volumes about their long-term Content Management strategy.

Before proceeding into my world of hypotheticals, you should read Real Story Group’s collection of thoughts on the deal.

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I’ve Been Doing This Four Years?

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This year as I write my post observing my blog’s anniversary, I am hit with conflicting realizations. One is that I cannot believe that it has been four years already. It seems like only yesterday I wasn’t blogging and I was just another local hack consultant.

Now of course, I am a hack on a much larger scale.

The other thought process is that when I go to events it seems like I’ve been doing this forever. When I started this blog, blogging in the Documentum space was thin. There were some other Content Management bloggers, but it wasn’t nearly as widespread as it is now. It used to be that if you blogged about Content Management, you made the blog roll. Now things change so much the roll has been sitting half-way through a revision for several months.

I started during the days when Johnny Gee was the only widely known Documentum blogger. That does seem like forever and an ago. Over that time, the Word has come to define who I am in the industry.

So, who is this annoying hack known as Pie……..?

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Looking Ahead to CMIS 1.1

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This week, over in Seattle, the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee is getting together for face-to-face meetings complete with plugfests every afternoon. It promises to be fun, but they are trying to accomplish some real work during all of this. The largest piece is the thought they are giving to what is going to be in the next version of CMIS.

Now I have some definite opinions which I am going to share. In order to facilitate disagreements, I am publishing the list of items they are taking under advisement. I have added bold to the ones that I care about the most.

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Documentum has a Vision Again, How About Execution?

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Last year I was pretty strong in my criticism of EMC’s lack of vision or strategy in the Content Management space. In a way I should thank them because it inspired me to write a post on the Future of Content Management that was later received fairly well at Gilbane Boston and info360.

Of course, none of that helps my existing Documentum clients, nor does it help the community at large. Well this year, EMC presented both a vision and a strategy at EMC World. I was pretty excited, not so much because I thought it was the best vision, but because it even vision.

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The Unspoken CMS SaaS Dilemma

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This is the last of my “drafty” posts that I’m shoving out. This one was a lot more evolved. I do want to say that this post was inspired by a chat I had with Andrew Chapman at a conference a few months ago. This is the first of at least two posts. No promises if/when the next one will surface.

Once more into the abyss…

There is a lot of attention being paid to the up-and-coming cloud-based Content Management providers. The reason why is obvious, Content Management offered as a SaaS offering has the potential to solve many of the problems faced by the system integrators of today. There is the problem is that they don’t have the features required today and their ability to add all of those features is limited by their SaaS nature.

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CMS Tech Making IT’s Life Harder

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I have some real, thoughtful, posts that I want to get out there. Okay, maybe only one. However, I don’t want to post them at the end of the week, so I am grabbing one of my rough draft articles to throw out for public ridicule and dissection.

This particular article is pretty raw, though I’ve smoothed a few rough edges. I’m posting it because one of the comments on my Preaching to the Content Management Choir post was from Steve Weisman who said,

I’ve said it for years and will say it again: the ECM industry’s greatest obstacle — never mind that it isn’t an “industry” at all — is psychology, not technology. Change management, organizational (mis)behavior, corporate culture etc. are all more in the way than the systems themselves, which all do work, more or less, pretty well. But only if you plan for and use them right — and therein lies the rub!

I think a lot of the reason that those are overlooked is because we lose time doing things that should be simple at this point. When schedules slip, the tasks aimed to deal with the psychological obstacles is cut.

So without further ado, the tech problem with a few inserted rants…

There has been a lot of talk of late in the great ether called the Content Management community about all of the different terms and systems. The focus has been both semantic and feature related. This debate is largely academic as a major challenge that a lot of companies are facing is the simplification of the operations and maintenance of a system.

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