So I was just casually heading over to look at an older Big Men on Content post when I saw their latest. It seems that Interwoven was purchased today by Autonomy. Uh, WOW! Okay, maybe a bit of an over-reaction, but with Vignette in a death spiral, what is next for them?
Before we get to Vignette, lets look at the news itself.
Recently, Sumanth Molakala sent me a comment regarding the best place to store metadata.
Here is the relevant portion of his comment:
…one of the key items I am trying to address in it is managing meta-data. I am sure you are aware of the two schools of thought – One – save content in content server and meta-data outside of the content server in a “custom” meta-data repository (assuming that the world doesn’t revolve around Documentum). Two – the traditional approach to save content and meta-data in the content server…
My quick answer…It depends! Before you shoot me, read on…
James McGovern, in responding to my previous post, brought up an interesting problem that I’d run across before, but hadn’t paid much attention to at the time. Not because we didn’t see the importance of the problem, but because we were several stages away from being able to even worry about it. When you don’t even have policies, getting into the nitty-gritty about implementing them across multiple systems from one control is not first on your list of concerns.
James McGovern and Jesse Wilkins have recently been exchanging a few thoughts regarding Records Management. It has been an interesting discussion and it can be an educational read for those that are trying to learn more about Records Management. I thought I would look at what they had written and add my two cents.
Recently I’ve had more to say than time. So I am taking some time while I watch a little football to comment on various topics. If I get any real feedback on any of these thoughts, I’ll spin it off as a separate post later…
Well, my post about more dialog got some great reactions. However, dialog about having a dialog isn’t the target. Jesse Wilkins did make an interesting point that people will talk about what interests them. He is exactly right. That is why we need more ECM bloggers. That way we have enough diversity to talk about any ECM topic. Of course, one of my goals is to get everyone to care about ECM standards.
I was very pleased by what I saw. Now let’s see what happens over the next few months as real topics surface.
Several months ago, Russ Stalter posted on how he was Disillusioned with the Current Definition of ECM. Russ provides a new definition for ECM, which I believe is better, but still suffers some of the same deficiencies of the current definitions. Tower Software picked up on the thread, deriding the box-checking definitions out there.
So the question has gone up repeatedly since this dialog began, what problems are we trying to solve? I’ve tried to explain this and I think I’ve been getting through. However, I still encounter pain in real life because of this. In fact, this just may be a punishment for raising such a ruckus.
Here is my most recent problem. A client has a legacy Records Management solution. It works well, though is a little dated. The client is now going to implement a Web Content Management solution. The approved web pages need to be automatically declared as a record. If these were the same ECM platform, there wouldn’t be any problem. However, they aren’t. In fact, one is Microsoft based and the other is Java based. Neither of them is Documentum, though that wouldn’t change the problem significantly.
Recently Mike Herrick asked a question on his blog about what formats should be supported for Form Data and storing Content for archival. James McGovern appears to have misinterpreted the question and asked which of these formats ECM Vendors should support and why they can’t convert between formats out of the box. His question has merit, so I am going to address both.
Word of Pie 