EMC Momentum 2009 – D6.5 Architecture Overview

I’m going to try and get through the backlogs of write ups which I have, starting with this session which was hosted by Victor Spivak on the Tuesday morning. Firstly I must criticise the scheduling, or rather room scheduling. Victor’s sessions are notorious for their high attendance so why put this on in one of the smaller rooms, there was no spare space!

Victor talked about the themes which drive the architecture, namely:

- SOA

- Performance/Scalability

Victor did say at the start that some of the session would be a repeat of last year’s, fortunately I did not attend that but I have looked at some of the details which Victor talked about.

On SOA Victor talked about the need to remove the chattiness of DFC and the addition of numerous new services for D6.5. REST will be supported post 6.5, possible 6.6 release in 2010. XML and JSON representations will be made available. EMC will not try and take sides in the SOAP vs REST debate and will support both.

CMIS was discussed and Victor talked about the disappointment of JSR170 and that being the reason behind the lack of Documentum support for it. He talked about the goals of CMIS, all publicly available, and how CMIS can be considered the Esperanto of the ECM world. However he did say that the current release is best served by the Use Case of a repository explorer without too much complex functionality.

He then talked about the Centerstage model and revealed that xCP 2.0 will be based on this, more to come on this in another post. However that is not the only client approach they will follow, note Mediaspace is Flex based. He also raised the interesting idea of using Spaces in Centerstage to support multi-tenancy in the cloud, I’ll have to check some details on this but could be interesting.

On Performance and Scalability, when I stopped being annoyed at the guy who was on his phone!, Victor talked about High Volume Services and the concept of batching citing the example of creating 100 objects in the docbase and the number of api calls this generates. This can be vastly reduced with the concept of batching. Victor also talked about the concept of Lightweight SysObjects.

Next up was the subject of search. Now I had heard from a colleague about Documentum Search Services and Victor talked about it briefly, he did point out the sessions which would cover the details. DSS will use the same Index Agent as the current Search solution but will use xDB. (I had heard from another session that this may complicate the install, I’ll need to check the notes on this one). EMC will not force customers to move away from FAST and will support DSS and FAST running side by side for the forseeable future.

Victor also talked about the 100k user benchmark and the impressive results this showed, he compared this with MOSS 2010 which allegedly will have a limit of 30m objects per repository; for my current project this would not see us through to the Olympics in 2012!

Finally Victor talked a little on Virtual Content Management, which is the use of Federated Records and then briefly talked about Operation Customisation. This is to cover situations where BOF would not apply and the example Victor quoted is when a user wants to import a zip file and then on import for the contents to be extracted to a folder. Another example is a Recycle Bin. Interestingly Victor suggested they would be interested to hear of scenarios which customers/partners would like covered off and they would look at these.

Overall then a good session, a lot of info was already available but then this was a 6.5 architecture. Victor is a good presenter who is clearly passionate about his subject area. As an intro to more detailed sessions this worked well, if only I had the time to get to the other sessions!

EMC Momentum 2009 – Day 1 Part 2

Following lunch there was an opportunity for Partners to decide to attend a technical session or a business session, based on discussions with colleagues of mine I attended the business session and I was pleasantly surprised. First up was a session on Public Sector. This focussed on the high expectations of our customers which sometimes work against the budgets which they have to deliver against these expectations.

Then we came back to the xCP subject. I admit to being, shall I say, reserved about the value of xCP but this session crystalised in my mind how this will work for EMC, for their partners and their customers. For some time now it has been a common criticism of the EMC CM&A products that they provide an excellent platform for building solutions but the cost, effort and time involved in building these is greater than their competitors. This is clearly their move to resolve this, the points which resonated with me were the following moves:

Technical –> Business

Tactical –> Strategy

Project –> Programme

In summary, it is about putting the product closer to the business value which customers are focussed on.

To bring this through to the message on xCP we then had a presentation on an ECM Roadmap Strategy (ERS) which reinforced the need to answer three pivotal questions:

- Why are you doing it?

- What does success look like?

- How are you going to get there?

In general this was a good, knowledgeable description of the concept of the journey customers need to take; although the journey when it came to systems development looked altogether too much like waterfall for my liking, but that could just have been the slides!

 

We then had a presentation about how EMC Professional Services are trialling the xCP programme and how solutions can be taken by partners through this to achieve a solution which can be repeatable and saleable. Again building on the earlier messages about business value this is very much XCP as a solution platform rather than Documentum as a technical platform. Something which I had perhaps overlooked was on the theme of xCelerators, the key components of the xCP platform; the message here was very much that the xCelerators need not just be code, they can be other artifacts too including Best Practice guides and Sample Applications. Whilst I agree with this point I think it is important that the xCelerators do involve a level of components which can be taken by customers and partners and deployed, with some configuration, to meet their specific needs. This was one of my concerns about the current xCP release but I believe that things are moving in the right direction.

So how do these solutions get built, well here’s the neat thing from EMC perspectives, they are proposing to build these as joint ventures with their partners. Partners need to take the propositions to EMC who will then churn out a more packaged, repeatable solution which can be applied to other similar customers. In principle this is a great idea but I also understand the potential problems where Partners may be reluctant to release IP into the wider Partner world. Also, as mentioned in the session, there is a need to put in place a commercial and ongoing support model which meets the needs of all the stakeholders, most importantly the customers.

Overall I came away from the session better informed about the direction of xCP and reassured that there is recognition within EMC of where they are on the journey and the work they need to do to progress this further.

Day 1 done and dusted on the sessions and this was a much better organised Partner day than last year in Prague. So far, so good and now a time to take a walk round the Exhibition and meet some old, and new, friends.

EMC Momentum 2009 – Day 1 Part 1

Day 1 of Momentum is set aside as the Partner days, where the multitude of Partners of EMC CM&A come together to get feedback on the business both in the past year and then an idea of strategy for the future. I’ve attended a number of the sessions today and have attempted to give an overview below and in a secondary post to come soon.

The theme for Momentum 2009 is ‘Inspired by the past…..primed for the future’, given the location in Athens there was a lot of talk of the history of Greece and Athens as a reminder of how we can look at past achievements to propel us to future success together. The event has sold out which is a success in the current market.

The strategy for 2010 is based on three pillars:

- being the leader in Information Governance;

- providing the leading composite application for Case Process Management;

- providing access to and securing the content assets;

These are backed by the overall mission to ‘Help our customers get maximum leverage from their information’.

We then had an industry spotlight session delivered by Chris and Atle wearing dresses, sorry manly robes! They picked out five industry trends and how the EMC product set can help:

1. Information is growing but companies are not confident they are managing their information. (MyDocumentum)

2. Complexity of use is increasing, customers are demanding an increase in ease, be that ease of use, ease of integration or ease of deployment. (xCP)

3. Social everything! About driving value through Social Media. (Centerstage)

4. Collaboration without governance is a disaster. (SourceOne)

5. Green IT, or the time for tree huggers, has come. (Captiva)

 

Next up was a session on Partnership; this was a good session which did not avoid some of the common issues around partnering. It focussed on the SI Partners more than perhaps the OEMs but the message was very clear. Again there was a message around xCP, yes it will reduce services revenue but this will enable the customers and the SIs to spend more time and money dealing with the real business issues rather than IT problems.

The final session in the morning was a Panel discussion which was chaired by Atle of AIIM. The session started slowly but there was some good questions, and equally good answers, around subjects such as competition with Microsoft.

Finally there was the Partner Awards and I, unashamedly, would like to highlight the Partner of the Year award which was awarded to Capgemini. We’ve worked hard to improve our relationship and this is a testament to the work of a number of people from both EMC and Capgemini.

Momentum 2009

Its Saturday night and everything is just about packed for the trip to Athens for EMC Momentum 2009. It will be a long today tomorrow to get there, leave the house at 8:45 and arrive in the hotel around 19:00, so hopefully the sessions will be worth it.

I’m going to attempt to write as many posts and tweets as possible in the next week, some posts will need to wait until the week after and some things will just get missed as I have a lot of things lined up in the next few days outside the actual sessions.

I’ll try and get notes up quickly in the day or so afterwards and then post something more reflective later on. I won’t be posting things which are told to me in confidence but will just comment on the public aspects of the conference.

Keep coming back for updates during the week and do not forget to visit me at twitter.com/leecsmith.

Me and Content Management

Pie seems to prompt a number of my blog posts on here, actually good that someone can initiate activity and spur me on to provide comment! Anyway, his latest prod has been on how we got involved in Content Management.

I actually started my IT career developing a set of workflow components based on Oracle technology, both Forms and some server side procedures. One of the implementations of this ‘product’ was in a pharmaceutical company within the manufacturing division. We implemented an application for tracking incidents in the plant to ensure they were fully investigated and any corrective action taken. As part of this various parties in the process would produce reports in the Document Management system they used, Saros Document Manager. I was very loosely involved in tha area of the system as I concentrated on the process design and implementation, nevertheless it was a start. (N.B. for those that don’t know FileNET acquired Saros).

I then worked on an eCommerce project for an online music store, well before Amazon! Whilst not Document Management this taught me the need for some of the basic Web Content Management services such as staging, approvals and content expiry…in effect we were building this functionality into the eCommerce application.

Anyway a change in career left me joining a company who specialised in Document Management implementations, amongst other things. To integrate me into the company I was sent to Sweden for 6 months where I learned an awful lot under the tutelage of some very knowledgeable, and patient, experts. The product they used the most was Documentum, and welcome to the world of RightSite…oh how life has moved on.

Interestingly I was asked to look at a new concept, this was in 2000/2001, Microsoft had released a product named Tahoe and I was asked to look at a new offering for the company called ‘Webben som Arbeitsplan’, or Web as a Workplace. We even built some integration between Tahoe and Documentum which we achieved through Web Services and the, at the time, emerging SOAP standards. Funny that 8 years later I’m still speaking to customers about the best way to achieve that!

Future of ECM

The current trend in the ECM blogosphere is to discuss where we are heading, what is the future vision of Content Management. Pie has discussed a vision which he labels Omnipresent Content Management, and backs this up with an interesting example Use Case. Big Men on Content discuss the trends to what could be termed microcontent, we live in a world where communication is shorter yet more frequent; they also discuss the move to more digital content.

One thing which Pie’s post challenges is the very label of Enterprise Content Management. Whilst the need for organisations to manage the content within their Enterprise will not disappear the approach which has been suggested is that the boundaries between content within the Enterprise and that outside is much less obvious. Basically there’s a big bucket of content which uses metadata and access permissions to distinguish between content within the Enterprise and that outside. Such a move would remove the E from ECM, as Pie suggests.

However if we ponder this nirvana a little longer we can see some problems with the approach, mainly I do not envisage a world with a single content bucket. There will continue to be different content stores, backed by different software products, with slightly different features, and in different physical locations.

I particularly like Chuck Hollis’ recent post on the future ‘lack’ of a filesystem. Many CM products, users, and I expect practitioners, still think with a mindset of where does the content need to go? This is generally how we work when accessing content. I take time to stress to people that the folder within which the content is located is just another piece of metadata about the content but the overriding perception is that this is THE most important piece of information about the content, most users will believe that if they know where the content is then they will know how to find it (well that is kind of obvious!). But this simply does not make sense as we move to a world where the content is supporting the primary business processes of an organisation. I don’t need to know where an Invoice is if I know the PO Number of the Account Number, similarly I do not need to know where a Witness Statement is if I know the Crime Identifier.

Chuck points out that the content repositories which exist can readily handle this more object view of the world but it is people who demand a view which they are comfortable view, and as practitioners we implement it!

So where does this fit in with the future of ECM. Bringing the two points above together, I think there will continue to be multiple repositories both within and external to the enterprise and that the behaviour and storage of this content will become more and more driven by its metadata. Consider a scenario where a biotech organisation is working on a new drug development, they are in the early stages of the development and the content they produce is their asset. This is vitally important to them and will be managed to internally. However during the life of the drug development they agree to a deal with a larger pharmaceutical organisation. At this stage the content needs to be shared, and worked on together. Policies within the internal repository can facilitate the movement of content to another repository which can be shared with the other organisation easily. However to the end user there must be no confusion as to where the content is stored, it is simple content associated with the drug development process to which they have access to.

Of course the future of Content Management will see many more developments than the one above, more formats will emerge, the growth in microcontent will continue, legislation will change, etc….. However if the above can be implemented, and implemented right!, then this will improve organisations’ ability to work across boundaries.

Office Web Applications

Recently I posted a tweet that suggested I believe the imminent release of the Office 2010, and in particular the Office Web Applications, poses a threat to the likes of Documentum and Open Text. It takes more than a tweet to explain this theory.

The video I watched on Office Web Apps can be viewed on the Microsoft site.

So why do I think that putting Word and Excel functionality, et al, onto the Web will pose a threat to the ECM vendors?

I was definitely impressed with the brief video show above and look forward to seeing how this feels for an end user. The site notes that the Office Web Apps are only available when purchasing the SharePoint license. This clearly indicates that the content which is being authored is thus stored in back end SharePoint repository. This close coupling between the authoring tool and the content repository is the clearest threat to the major ECM vendors. It is extremely unlikely that Microsoft will publish an API which enables customers to pick and choose the repository within which there content is stored, I admit I have not looked hard for this information so if they have published anything, positively or negatively, on this front then please let me know.

By unveiling an approach which reduces the distinction between the authoring tool and the storage repository Microsoft have increased the pressure on the ECM vendors. Admittedly the strengths of the likes of EMC and OpenText remain, for example full ECM capability including DAM and WCM, RM and compliance functionality and true scalability. However I suggest that customers will start to look past some of these when they have the power to do so and accept some of the failings in the SharePoint product set in return for the complete solution. This will not be possible for all customers, for example Pharmaceutical validation will still require some of the rich functionality of a Documentum. It also may not be incentive enough for other more CEVAs which have been developed for customers, for example A/P solutions which may use the integration between SAP and OpenText.

For simple Document Management where customers are interested in using a repository which is ‘good enough’ then I believe this is a big play from Microsoft.

Also a number of the ECM vendors have solutions for native interaction with the repository from the desktop Office products; would this even be possible with the new model? What could help the other ECM vendors? CMIS.

If Microsoft were to make a leap and enable their Office Web Applications to be used with any CMIS compliant repository then this would be a step towards customers keeping their options open.

There’s a lot that still needs to be considered but if Microsoft do lock the Office Web Apps into a SharePoint repository then I see this as a major threat to the ECM vendors.

Documentum Composer

As posted previously we’ve been using Composer quite a lot on our current project and have set up a development environment which the dev team should be proud of. There is no doubt in my mind that Composer is a big step forward in the Documentum development process. Being able to work on artifacts which are stored on a filesystem and then having this controlled through a code management tool such as Subversion is a big benefit.

Our environment

The approach to development has been to give the developers access to an image of the Documentum server side components, namely the Content Server and Web Application we’re using, RMA. Each developer starts with an identical image, i.e. the products are all the same and they work locally against the image in their own space. When they’re happy with their work it gets checked in to Subversion and then deployed to the central development server.

Point 1: We have not achieved my ultimate goal of continuous build and automated deployment into the central development server. This would help us enormously; as we are working to some of the Agile principles this may be something we bite the bullet on as the Technical Debt we face may prove expensive in the long run. This is not due to any technical problems, just time as we have been focussing on some user demonstrations and addressing some of the technical components of the solution.

Point 2: We have not achieved the goal of using a single product for all Documentum development. Problems with the WDK development have meant that we still use a true version of Eclipse for WDK development and Composer for some of the Documentum based configuration/development.

Point 3: We had to have the developers have their own version of tomcat running locally on the PC, not within the image. Well I say we had to but we took the decision this was the most efficient, enabling us to deploy much easier and also to run in Debug mode better.

Point 4: We have had problems with Forms, creating them in Forms Builder and then bringing them into the Composer project to deploy has caused us grief. Support has been raised on this one but our workaround has been to revert to using DAB as the vehicle for moving Forms from one repository to another.

Point 5: Forms, and Process Builder, again. Okay it would be too much for the early release but it would be really good if we can start to see Process Builder and Forms Builder being integrated into Composer. If I’m developing an application which is based on a process and uses a form which requires some validation, or another level of adaptor, then I’ve got 3 products up and running. Plus the Form and the Process are still being built in the repository. Not a complaint but more of something to add to the wish list!

Overall the product gets a big thumbs up though, huge step in the right direction from EMC and when the next release comes out with Forms and Process plug-ins which can be licensed separately then I’ll raise a glass.

10 Things About Me

Following in the spirit of Pie’s recent post I thought I’d post 10 facts about me:

1. I grew up in Carlisle, a city right in the north of England and a city which, famously, was subject to many a dispute in its past over whether it was Scottish or English.

2. As a result of 1 I am a Carlisle United supporter, currently in League 1 in the English Football League. Lets hope they can stay there, 3 games left and 5 or 6 points probably needed.

3. I’m married with 2 kids, both girls. If you’re reading this after June 2009 then this should say 3 kids, here’s hoping everything goes okay!

4. I love my sport, be it football, cricket, golf, rugby union. You name it I enjoy playing or watching it. One of my goals in life is to go to Australia and watch an Ashes series.

5. I built the website for my wife’s business, you can see it and buy loads of products from it here.

6. I’ve spent time living in Sweden, in Gothenburg. It was here that I learned Documentum and also some of the nuances of Swedish life such as fika, Pripps Bla and the wonderfully named chocolate of Plopp!

7. I started in Oracle Forms and was involved/lead a project to build a suite of Process Components based on Oracle Forms. I look at things such as Documentum Forms and sometimes think we’ve moved backwards in the past 12 years!

8. In 2002 I was involved in a proof of concept that surfaced content from Documentum in a Sharepoint site, back then it was called Tahoe. At the time I thought we would end up with a decent solution, I still hope we can!

9. I spend way too much time away from home.

10. Surprisingly I don’t have a favourite ECM product. Each has its merits, MOSS is easy, quick to use and very powerful for a novice user group, IBM have a good story around Portal integration (well they did a few years ago) and Documentum is so rich you can do so much with it, sometime I think too much!

Missing in Action

Its been some time since I posted an entry, this is down to a combination of work and family pressures, plus I’ve been spending more time on Twitter and Yammer. You can follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/leecsmith. Its been good fun using Twitter, I use it for mainly social purposes but there are people within my organisation, and also external, who use it and it is a useful tool to see what they are up to and prompt them for more information. Within our organisation we have also started to use Yammer, www.yammer.com, and this has proven an excellent social networking tool. It has really broken down some of the traditional barriers we have had within the organisation and opened up the amount of expertise and knowledge we have at our disposal.

On the work front I’ve been working on a large Documentum project. A number of things have come up which I will post on in the coming weeks once the work dies down a little. We’ve learned a lot about Composer and the team can be really proud of the way they have set up a development environment which I think can be used as a reference for future projects as it brings together Composer, Subversion, Trac wiki, WDK Automated Test Framework and other tools and tricks to really aid in the dev lifecycle. We’re also using elements of Agile techniques, I say elements as I could not hand on heart say it is a fully agile project but we are following 2 week sprints with a sprint backlog and a Product Owner. The requirements are prioritised within the Sprint but ultimately every requirement is mandatory. This is working really well and a product like Documentum lends itself well to such an approach as it does give such a strong start to the process which means that the early iterations can really start to produce something useful.