Pie’s Application Separation

Interestingly when I first read Pie’s tweet to advertise this post I thought it was going to be focussed on Content Enabling applications. I suppose it is but some of the applications he talks about content enabling are very close to the platform services being provided, e.g. WebPublisher and Centerstage. Does this mean I think it is wrong? No, not at all. Pie has exposed a model which is very interesting. With the Core Server customers would buy the platform and a way to interact with the basic services the platform provides, it would be interesting to understand where the line is drawn on Basic Content Services…e.g. is MOSS in this group?

For Applications Pie adds the likes of WebPublisher and Centerstage, the Documentum apps. In this space I see some separation between these style of products and the more vertically focussed implementations. Something more akin to:

– Extended Content Applications – those applications which are still focussed on providing horizontal content solutions but with enriched services focussed on a specific ECM Use Case such as Web Content Managment or Digital Asset Management;

– Business Solution Content Applications – those applications which are taking a specific business solution where there is a need to interact with unstructured content and providing the application to perform these tasks;

It is the latter which I am becoming increasingly interested in, I’m making some notes on a post about Case Management which I hope to post this side of Christmas.

So will Pie’s model work? Yes. Do I think the market is ready for this? Not yet, and I think it is the vendors who are the farthest away from this concept although CMIS should provide a vehicle for them to provide this. Take Documentum for example, with their CMIS release they have some very basic content services which they can expose…the decision they need to make now is which services form the rest of the platform services and how can they expose these in a way which enables CMIS to develop.

There is also a certain amount of kudos which is taken from having your app used by customers at the front end, moving ECM closer to being an infrastructure may not be something the vendors will necessarily embrace. But then how many times will you hear people say things such as “Documentum is a really annoying product” (Quote taken from a quick search of Twitter for Documentum)? The answer is quite high, and this is something which creates a poor reflection on Documentum as the users are typically complaining about the way they interact with the services and not necessarily the services themselves.

Any vendor that can shape themselves to providing the most scalable, performant, secure and compliant unstructured store which provides a rich set of services which can be used will be one step to establishing a differentiator for themselves. The second step will be to get a strong strategy of working with partners to use those services in business focussed applications such as Contract Management, Case Management and Purchase to Pay applications.

Blog Trends

I was just having a look at some of the stats on my blog and thought I would have a look at the stats for all time…..just which of my posts have seen the most hits. The top 5 is as follows:

Gartner Report
EMC Documentum and MOSS
Liferay
Documentum Records Manager
Documentum Archive Services for Sharepoint

Interestingly the numbers are quite different, Gartner Report having nearly 3 times as many hits as Documentum Archive Services for Sharepoint. Of the top 5 the Liferay one is the one which surprises me the most, okay it is a detailed post but I did not think the subject matter would catch people’s attention. The others can be attributed, largely, to two keywords Gartner and Sharepoint.

Even more interesting is the bottom 5:

Momentum
iGoogle
Information Architecture
Opportunities
Natives and Immigrants

The thing that strikes me is the brevity of the titles and the lack of product names in them. A couple of those posts still stand, at least in my mind, as valid and interesting, a couple are very brief and would probably be better served by Twitter (which I was not using at the time).

What to take from this….? Make sure the posts are titled well and use that to ‘bring the punters in’. However I don’t use this as a means to bring the punters in, this is a forum to put information and insights which may or may not be useful to people…just hitting home with one will be enough for me.

BTW I’ll be monitoring the hits on this post, if I’m right this will be near the bottom 5!

EMC Momentum 2009 – Keynote

Whitney introduced the keynote, reinforcing the theme of ‘Inspired by the past…Primed for the future’, before handing the reins to Mark Lewis.

Mark set the tone by reinforcing that the future is bright for EMC CM&A. He quoted an example of his personal experience of visiting a doctor and having to complete the same details multiple times. He then talked about Business Value, and the need and desire for EMC to drive Business Value. He then introduced the three pillars of the strategy for EMC CM&A:

– Value. Covered by Access and Process.

– Efficiency. Covered by Governance, Access and Process.

– Compliance. Covered by Governance and Access.

He also talked about a move from Application Centric to Information Centric, and a move from Static Placement to Dynamic Movement, see my earlier post on the Future of ECM to see my views on this.

Back to the earlier themes of Governance, Access and Process. Mark introduced these as the three main product groups in CM&A.

Governance

These are the products covering Archiving, EDRM and Search/eDiscovery.

Access

The theme of this group is having it your way and includes the stages of Capture, Communication, Collaboration, Context and Cloud.

Process

This is about building the custom solutions, interestingly Mark talked about Content Enabled Applications, note no Vertical in the title. This is where xCP fits in, Mark described it as the Case Process Platform. He claimed this is the first for the industry, I’m not sure this is true but it could be a major step forward for EMC.

 

Mark then handed over to John O’Melia who conducted an interview with the CIO of Eurobank, but the main chunk of the session was Mark’s message. Mark’s message was clear and the alignment of the products was clear. He showed a lot of belief in the future and especially in xCP, I left the session needing to find out more about how XCP was going to be executed.

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!

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!

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.

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 http://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, http://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.

Documentum Technical Tips

A new blog has appeared from Don Robertson with some excellent posts on the finer technical aspects of Documentum. A lot of the posts appear to be on some of the more recent features of Documentum such as Smart Containers and Aspects.

Momentum 2008: Developing Web 2.0 with Centerstage

This was a more technical session than the previous one I posted about, really looking to get more under the hood of Centerstage and look at some of its key concepts. Some of the concepts include:

– Space, e.g. an eRoom, i.e. an area where a group of people can work together. Each space appears as a tab, much like tabbed browsing (Why not just use the tabbed browsing functionality in the browser then and not have the look repeated?)

– Page, a collection of content, attachments, widgets. It is a composite view of ‘objects’. Pages can be templated for reuse. Pages themselves can be versioned.

– Section, a collection of pages within a Space. These also can have templates to ensure commonality.

– Tags, each object can be tagged. These are implemented through relationships and thus are not keywords, this also helps in terms of management of your tags. There are views available which are driven by tags, e.g. I can see all information for a given tag, implemented like tag clouds. I can also select which tags are important to me thus reducing the clutter in the tag cloud.

We then moved on to the architecture which was of real interest. A large block diagram was put on the screen which showed the various layers in the Centerstage architecture. The points I took from this are:

– provide clear separation in the layers;

– use of DHTML and other RIA toolkits;

– UI based on a combination of RCMP (Rich Content Management Platform), ExtJS and DWR (Direct Web Remoting);

– interaction with the core of Documentum through services, WS*;

– DWR is a custom protocol for Java <-> Javascript;

– ExtJs gives no server side page generation, exact version was 2.2;

– No JSPs;

– widgets can be developed and added fairly easily;

– widgets provide customisation but can also be done through XML configuration and some policy objects;

– widgets will tend to be a collection of .js and .css, but flex and silverlight will also be supported;

– views are a grouping within a tab, these are exposed as a ‘chiclet’ – made me chuckle anyway!

– flows through the UI are defined by actions which are a flow through the containers, defined in xml on the server;

Other things to note in the session:

– content in Centerstage will be exposed through Webtop, but the look will be slightly different;

– the product was compared to the tenets of Web 2.0, unfortunately not the tenets I would have used which are SLATES

Overall this is an exciting product, I think there will be opportunities for it but as I said previously it is a crowded marketplace. It is a big shift in technology for Documentum and I wonder how long they will stick with WDK before they move to this approach for all their clients….its something new for the techies to get their teeth into and we will have a couple of years when we need to be proficient in WDK and RCMP, which is the label they gave it.

The last thing I will say on this though is that I believe this is the nearest EMC will get to a Portal, without purchasing a Portal product. Not a J2EE Portal container but the paradigm of widgets is very similar to that of widgets and I can imagine users asking to see some custom widgets which interact with other systems such as an ERP system or MOSS. The Portal word was never used by EMC and this is not their published approach but it does not take too much brainpower to see the analogy.