I’m happy and sad about this session. I LOVE having the Roadmap session starting a conference off on the right foot. On the other hand, not a big fan of a conference starting on a Sunday. Blows a whole weekend and there are some people to whom taking Sunday as a day of rest/worship is still important.
The speakers are Don Prodehl (VP Research & Development) Darryl Hopkins (Director R&D/ Product Manager), and Craig Dellorso (Chief Customer Officer).
Notes:
I am about to do what I stopped doing several years ago, start paying attention to James McGovern. Why? Because he is talking about several important issues that need to be dealt with in the industry.
Years ago, James and I discussed Security standards around Identity Management, primarily SAML. While my focus on the time was on Documentum, the issues were universal. Since we last interacted online, James has moved on to HP in an advisory role for clients.
Sadly, the issues we discussed are still prevalent in the industry. In fact, these issues are becoming more important with the advent of new players in the cloud space.
Sure, the new vendors support integrations and work with existing Active Directory installations. That’s nice. So did the established vendors. The problem remains, there is no standard way to pass both Authentication and Authorization.
As I covered in my last post, Implementing an ECM Strategy without a Platform, you don’t need an Enterprise CMS Platform to implement a successful Enterprise Content Management Strategy. That doesn’t mean that you can’t use one or that using one would be the wrong approach. Just like there is no one-size-fits-all CMS, there is no single way to define and implement an ECM Strategy.
I am going to look at this in two stages. The first is going to focus on the purpose of and foundation for an Enterprise CMS Platform. The second is going to look at what capabilities a CMS needs in order to be a Platform.
So a funny thing happened on my way to the West Coast this week, I was invited to a product launch at Box.net. I’ve always been a fan of the concept of Content Management in the Cloud and the direction Box has taken in the Content Management space.
The established vendors are having to determine how to change both their business models and architecture before they more to the the cloud. Box is already there, they just need more features.
This is the third year in a row at this session. Mike (MT) Mohen is a smart guy who really knows what it take to make DFS work in the real world. This stuff is also applicable to EMC’s CMIS implementation as it is built on top of DFS.
One of my most popular session notes from last year returns for a sequel. Not a bad way to start the conference. Let’s see if Michael (MT) Mohen of EMC Professional Services can deliver on their promise to provide us with lots of new material…
A month or so ago, I asked people to post questions that I would try and get answered at EMC World. Every question had to do with security. Unfortunately, I was unable to track down all the right people to ask the right questions in a timely fashion. Part of this was my fault as I didn’t keep on top of the questions that I had promised to get answered. There was one situation where I was told by person X that I needed to talk to person Y. The irony was that I had spend half an hour the previous night socializing with person Y, never realizing that I should ask that question and I never saw person Y again.
So if I don’t answer your question, I didn’t ask it and I am sorry. If it is any consolation, I didn’t get all of my questions answered either. So to Robin, no idea about the future of Common Criteria certification. James, I neglected to ask about about Ounce Labs and static code testing as a whole (whenever I remembered the question, I was invariably talking to a marketing person and not one of the product managers).
I would like to thank all the product managers for patiently letting me ask my questions repeatedly until we were sure that we were talking about the same thing. I also want to thank Craig Randall for all the time that he spent with me during the conference, and later via email. He was very helpful and worked with me to more fully understand my business scenarios. He successfully directed me to the correct product managers to give the scenarios to directly. Now I am bothering them, leaving Craig to talk about more relaxing topics (at least until my next hard question).
Decided to hear what EMC is thinking about in regards to Software as a Service. SaaS is grabbing a lot of attention these days. Ameet Jani, on the Server team, is going to be sharing thoughts on how to build SaaS applications on Documentum.
I’ve been meaning to get back to this topic for quite some time. Before moving onto other Standards topics, I want to try and conclude this thread on SAML. James and I traded responses about authentication and SAML, and I applaud James for taking time to look into the capabilities of the DFC to respond to my previous post. James did get several details of the DFC incorrect, but not regarding any points important to this discussion.
Time for some more dialog with James McGovern. I love this kind of discussion because it raises awareness of the issues in the community. James replied to my last post on Standardizing Authentication. There is a problem with written communication sometimes. No matter how clearly you think you write or explain something, someone will always either misread, misunderstand, or misinterpret something. Before I get into that, two things first.
In another post, James says something nice about ECM. Understand that ECM provides value regardless of whether it has standards. Can you feel the love? He does qualify that he isn’t pleased with the vendors, but we now know how he really feels.
Second, I wanted to say that James is dead on with this statement regarding SAML and Documentum. The beautiful thing is that you shouldn’t have to learn how to write this type of thing as this should be out of the box. He is absolutely correct. I shouldn’t even need to think about how I would implement SAML in Documentum. That is EMC’s job. Now on to the rest of James’ response/analysis.
Word of Pie 