Standards

A New ECM Standard for Spinning Wheels

3 Comments

Lee Smith found an interesting event taking place in the UK. While his post doesn’t make 100% clear what he thinks of this effort (I think he is in favor), I think that it needs some commenting upon.

Essentially, an integrator in the UK, The Content Group, is teaming up with BSI Group, an engineering standards company out of the UK, to create a group of ECM Standards. The Standards that they plan on creating are a collection of definitions and best practices. This seems like a marketing ploy to me.

Continue reading →

Transparent ECM and SOA

2 Comments

Something happened recently that doesn’t happen too often. Two ECM vendors posted blog posts on similar topics. It definitely wasn’t intentional and they approached the topic from two different angles. However, it is worth noting and comment. The more interesting post, to me at least, was from EMC.

Continue reading →

The ECM Blogsphere

5 Comments

Recently, James wrote expressing his concern that the ECM domain doesn’t seem to collaborate. His opening paragraph was straight to the point is not an entirely inaccurate picture of the ECM industry:

It is plagued by a plethora of disconnected products that don’t integrate well, no notion of patterns or detailed reference architectures or even a consistent definition for what the ECM even contains. There are no standards specific to ECM, none of the vendors collaborate and yet everyone seems comfortable with this fact.

In this one fact I would dispute is the fact that everyone seems comfortable with the status quo. That is both very true and false all at the same time.

Continue reading →

The ECM WSDL Discussion Leading to More

Tell everyone that you aren’t going to have time to write many entries and people start blogging about cool and interesting topics. Here is a quick rundown of the ECM WSDL analysis and my thoughts.

  • Our old buddy James McGovern started the whole thing off. He has apparently been sharing is frustration with his significant other and he wrote a post on the sad state of WSDLs in the ECM space. They are ugly and poorly written in his experience. Not having delved into any out of the box WSDLs in ECM, I can hardly argue. It wouldn’t shock me though. Hopefully the DFS ones will measure up better. James then starts to talk about the ECM systems having a standard Document Query Language and a common WSDL built upon that structure. Sounds good to me. In fact, it is a nice, positive contribution to the whole ECM standards issue.

Continue reading →

Single Sign-On, SAML, and Authentication in Documentum

14 Comments

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.

Continue reading →

D6 is Coming!

3 Comments

Been slowing down a bit as I focus on several work and family activities that have precluded me from writing many entries. However, today I saw something in the Documentum Developer Site News feed on the side of my blog. EMC is gearing up for the release of D6 and I am starting to get excited. I’m not the only one if the hits on my blog are any indication.

Continue reading →

A Timely Example of Needed ECM Standards

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.

Continue reading →

ECM Standards, SAML, and the DFC

2 Comments

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.

Continue reading →

Standardizing Authentication

Been a busy week on the ECM standards front. There has been a lot of discussions going around. I’ve been silent on the topic as I’ve been focusing on learning more about SAML and XACML so that I can respond to James’ question. Plus, the dialogs are going great and I haven’t needed to keep them going.

I am not ready to give James an answer on XACML, yet. I feel I am ready to start a dialog on SAML though.

Continue reading →

Storing Form Data and Records for the next 100 Years

8 Comments

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.

Continue reading →