Shameless Plug

Well my better half has finally decided to take the plunge and after a few months of toying with the idea she is packing in work as a Business Analyst for a major Financial company to commit herself to a business she has started up.

So far she has not expressed a need for an ECM solution to assist but I’ll keep her abreast of the latest developments if she needs to.

So if you know someone who has just had a baby or knows someone who likes new baby gifts or baby keepsake boxes point them in the direction of Angel Gift Company.

D6.5

D6.5 has been announced on Powerlink now with the following focus areas:

- Platform improvements

- Knowledge Worker solutions e.g. CenterStage

- Transactional Content Management

- Interactive Content Management

- Compliance and Archiving

I’m really interested in the the Knowledge Worker solutions and Transactional Content Management up front but the improvements to the platform and the Compliance and Archiving views need to be looked at as well.

Taking Centerstage and some words on MOSS

Documentum have announced that Magellan will now be named Centerstage, not sure about the name but it sure beats Magellan.

I was fortunate enough to see a demonstration/presentation a couple of weeks ago and it is very interesting. In fact I know of customers who are taking notice and starting to consider whether they should rush into a SharePoint integration with this coming down the line.

Speaking of which I’ve had some time looking at SharePoint recently and some quick findings are below. Its not the first time I have looked at it as I was the lead on a company intranet which was built on an early version of SharePoint but it has moved on since then.

- The UI is great, no doubt about that, it is so easy to chop and change the views and make everything easy for the end user.

- Usability, as a result, is no problem….I can imagine the cost of training is minimal compared to the problems with Webtop.

- Starting workflows is remarkably similar to in Webtop.

- Building workflows is a pain, unless you buy a 3rd party product prepare to get your hands dirty, very dirty.

- Audit capability….mmmmm. Have a good look at this, its not what it may appear at first sight.

- Lists, nice and easy…great feature…just don’t go over 2000 entries.

- Search, poor but then they have now got FAST so expect improvements.

SOA Conversation

So I was on the train the other day when I overheard a conversation between two IT professionals. One was a young budding Web Developer and other a more experienced technician. I didn’t listen in on purpose but my ears pricked up when they started on one subject.

Budding Developer - ‘So you must be considering SOA then…?’

Old Hack - ‘Yes, its something we muct look into.’

Budding Developer - ‘So what product are you using then?’

I didn’t say anything but it does surprise me that people still think putting in a product gives you an SOA. Its not about a product, its about an approach and how you design and build your business services and relate these to the IT services you provide. If the ideas I heard continue then this will become another failure in IT, unfortunately it won’t be the idea/paradigm which is the problem but the implementation and understanding of it.

SharePoint Workflow

I try not to pick on a product and the weaknesses it has but I’ve spent the past week working with SharePoint and in

particular its workflow capability and its integration with InfoPath. For a while I thought it was me being too picky and

relating too much to my Documentum experience but I came out from that slumber, some of this is basic workflow and the fact

that SharePoint does not do it or does not do it well was a bit of an eye opener for me. So what’s my beef:

Auditing - support for Auditing appears to be very poor, in fact when an instance of a Workflow is completed the audit trail is removed, or rather the association of the audit trail to the item. Now there are a number of solutions to this, one suggested one is to create a List to store the audit entries. Fine, but that does involve some coding to get the solution to write to the List…er not good. Then you uncover that Lists start to creak at about 200 entries….er not good at all. Auditing is a basic requirement of workflow and if a product does not support this then in a matter of fact way then its not worth its place on the list of products.

Forms - so we’re using Infopath forms to render forms. We’re not using MOSS, we’re using WSS. We wanted to have an Infopath form be displayed for a task which updates a data object, but we do not want to access the full data object…its unnecessary. One would think this is a straightforward requirement, oh no. In fact as we are not using MOSS only WSS, but with Forms Server, the tasks cannot be presented as Infopath forms…they need to be built as aspx forms; I can see my development work increasing all the time here. Then it becomes clear that SharePoint does not really support the idea of forms updating other objects, or parts therein, the full form should be displayed. I have to say I still doubt whether my reading of this is correct….but if it is, another black mark.

All in all it has been a less than positive experience of using SharePoint workflow. If I’ve misunderstood something above then drop me a note and I will correct it but unless there is a very big eureka moment I won’t be running to a customer with SharePoint as a solution to some of their business processing problems!

Documentum Archive Services for Sharepoint

I’ve been having some fun(?) this week installing and configuring Documentum Archive Services for SharePoint, let’s just say the documentation is far from ideal on this and it is also far from clear some of the rationale behind some of the problems we encountered. Anyway, some notes which may provide useful if you too try this installation:

Note: We were installing into a WSS installation which was configured through multiple users and with all users within a domain but which also had Microsoft Office Forms Server installed.

The following steps are required to install the Documentum Archive Services for SharePoint:
1. Create a SQL Server database as specified in the document Documentum Archive Services for Sharepoint 5.3 SP5.
2. Install Documentum Foundation Classes (DFC) and Primary Interop Assembler (PIA) on the WSS server. Note that once DFC is installed it creates an msi which should be used to install PIA.
3. Run the DCTM Archive Services.msi to install Archive Services. Ensure you have the server name and database for the database created in 1 as these will be used.
4. In order to configure the product to run using a domain user the following steps are also required. These are an amended list of steps taken from the document Documentum Archive Services for SharePoint Release Notes.
a. Grant the SharePoint Application Pool account full control permission on the DOCUMENTUM location.
b. Add a folder e.g. c:\dctm_tmp.
c. Grant the SharePoint Application Pool AND SharePoint MOFS Admin account full control to this folder.
d. Add the path to the [DMAPI_CONFIGURATION] section of the dcml.ini file in C:\Windows. Local_path = c:\dctm_tmp.
e. Grant the SharePoint Application Pool account full control to the Documentum hive in the registry.
f. Add the following to [DOCUMENTUM]\dfc.properties:
i. dfc.registry_mode=file
ii. dfc.registry_file=${dfc.user.dir}/Documentum.ini
g. Reset Internet Information Server, iisreset.
Note that Step 4 above removes the need to follow a solution on EMC Powerlink, ID esg44475, as this creates an alternative location for the dir.lck file.
Also note the reason for ensuring that the two users have access to c:\dctm_tmp, as defined in 4c, is due to the fact that the first time a Mapping is created everything works fine with just the Application Pool account having full account but future mappings require the MOFS Admin account to have access.

I’ll post some more next week on some of the experiences we have with the product and why people need to read Pie’s excellent post on the virtues of patience with SharePoint and Documentum.

EMC World 2008

Many thanks to Pie for the regular updates from EMC World over in Vegas. Reading his posts it does appear that Documentum is about to be taken in an exciting direction. I’m particularly excited to see the new Magellan client; I’ll be on the phone to them in the next few weeks to see when a demonstration can be scheduled.

Working for an SI I believe we have a massively important role to play with customers on the advent of the new releases. Many customers over here in Europe are still working on version 5 and will continue to do so past the end of the year, upgrades make many people nervous especially when a large part of the Documentum community are involved due to compliance or regulatory reasons. We need to be working now with this community to help them understand their roadmap, and importantly we need to be sure that the end goal is driven by business need and not our technical enthusiasm for the new features. Even now I find myself in discussions with customers who have aspirations but for whom the technology is not yet there; they could spend a lot of effort in building the required functionality but the promise is on the horizon. I’m speaking specifically about SharePoint integration and will return to this topic in the next week when I have collated my thoughts.

Thanks again to Pie, if I manage to make my way to Prague later in the year for Momentum I’ll be looking to provide some information from there. EMC are attempting to bring our community closer together and provide platforms for this to happen but the best way for this to succeed is through our own commitment.

MOSS and Documentum

MOSS and Documentum

I’ve had some time lately to think more about the question of integration, or unification, between MOSS and Documentum; or any other ECM system for that matter. This came about as a result of a couple of situations where I found organisation looking closely at how to integrate the two producs; plus some reading of Andrew Chapmans blog.

Taking a big step backwards for a while I started to get a little concerned the way things are moving here, it feels as though there is a great deal of momentum behind the movement to have both systems operating together. Is this really the best way to serve an organisation’s requirements, in fact what are the organisation requirements?

It is not pushing things too hard to suggest that an organisation would like to capture, store, manage, use, distribute and possibly archive some of their content. I doubt there is any requirement to have these things met by having two repositories of information so what is it that one gives that the other does not?

MOSS

One of the key arguments in the pro MOSS brigade is the UI and the level of collaboration available within MOSS. I’ve asked a few people a number of times and if anyone out there has any suggestions but what collaborative features are people looking for which MOSS provides which Documentum cannot? With regards UI, if people move down the approach of Webparts then at the end of the day the UI they use to access Documentum through MOSS is the same as using Webtop basically.

Documentum

The weight here is usually behind the issues of compliance and scalability. Compliance is something which MOSS is starting to deal with and I expect it to be comparable in the near future. Scalability remains a concern for MOSS implementations, however I’d expect this to be resolved in the next 12-24 months.

Perhaps I am missing something here but it does seem that the approaches being proposed are not actually going to solve the business problems but will instead justify the need for having two ECM systems when one will do. We should be evaluating the systems against the requirements of the business and deciding which one is the best fit.

D6 Composer

A nice and brief demo has been released by EMC of D6 composer.

It looks excellent. Consolidating the IDE tools for Documentum Developers will make life much easier. I’m going to have to get my hands on it shortly, especially as I’ll be starting a new piece of work in the next few weeks which looks like a very interesting project with Documentum at the heart of it as the Content Platform.

More on the FAST news

I read this post on the proposed FAST acquisition. Its clear Documentum won’t be putting a bid in, in fact their strategy appears to be moving towards giving their customers choice on what search engine underpins their platform. I expect to see a choice between Lucene, Autonomy and possibly FAST but I’m not convinced.

Another interesting point in the note is the comment that Google are likely to move to a model where they provide storage for our data. This is something I discussed in an earlier entry , although I took it a step further and predicted that this space will include some of the Basic Content Services we see in Document and Content Management now. I agree that security and governance will prompt fears but if we csn resolve the problem of taking this model into the enterprise it would become a very attractive proposition.