Certified System Architect 13 January 2010
Posted by lopataru in ECM.Tags: documentum, certification
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For a long time now I wanted to take the Content Management System Architecture exam from EMC. Never got the time.
Until last week when my colleagues said they need someone with that on their CV alongside some other mojo stuff.
I thought: how hard can it be? I have over 5 years of experience with it.
First of all, let’s take the online practice exam. Surprise, surprise: failed. Looser! I guess it’s time to do some reading… The nice thing about the assessment is that it points the weak spots.
After some reading of the various administrative guides and training materials, I went to face the dragon. I did not take the online assessment again, just jumped right in.
Passed with flying colors.
Which is good. Good is also that I discovered areas of the Documentum I had not deeply explored before . Who uses Privileged DFC anyway?
PhD almost here 10 January 2010
Posted by lopataru in Research.Tags: content management, PhD, ramblings
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A long, long time ago, (in a galaxy far, far away?)… I started my PhD in Computer Science.
Now it seems the final step is near, I just talked with my professor and we kicked off the arrangements for the public presentation. The internal university presentation was in September, last year.
I’m writing this post just to mark another milestone. And where better to place it than online… because the web never forgets. Like a giant records management system with permanent retention… almost.
This way I’m almost sure that when I will try to remember when this happened I will always be able to look it up on the net 
. Isn’t it interesting?
On my computer I don’t have files older than several years… but my yahoo account is older than my first paycheck. And I never deleted any non-spam email in that account.
Of course, yahoo or wordpress can go away at any time… they made no guarantees to me but here I am trusting them with my valuable letters. It’s like using SharePoint for my ECM: not adequate but convenient…. and it sure gets the thing done.
One of my obsessions come to mind now: What’s the percentage of records management software (not necessarily certified) which does not need a major migration during their records retention timespan? I can hardly see more than 1% of current software installations surviving a 10+ year time, not to talk about 30 or 40 years. We were using floppy disks 15 years ago…
Anyway, I’ll better present the PhD while it still has some value in it. I am already thinking of rewriting it the third time.
Happy Content Management!
Get the things done and try not to worry to much of the future, we are all doomed anyway.. aren’t we? ))
Looking back in 2009 31 December 2009
Posted by lopataru in ECM, Various.Tags: documentum, sharepoint, 2010, 2009, filenet, adobe
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When 2009 started we had the usual project line-up.
One particular project emerged in a nice CEVA solution on top of Documentum for technical documentation management. The most special thing about this project was that we encountered not no many technical challenges but many project management ones. We had our fair share of problems, but the customer PM was one of those persons who are afraid of taking any decision and this toghether pushed the end of the project to near the end of 2009. Anyway, the result is a very very nice application on top of Content Server, including a very nice own developed Silverlight image viewer to display huge drawings over a limited network. Lessons learned? Many!
The next project which comes to mind is one which had the official kickoff just before Christmas 2008: a BPM project for the biggest bank here. a project to manage all documents, regulations and other stuff which need management board approvals. the challenge, as stated in the RfP: “implementation time: 1 month”. Lol. Tried to educate the customer and brought that to about June. This was the full Documentum BPM suite to be customized a lot and then implemented. We know from the beginning that even June is optimistic. 1 week ago was the last go live. Err… there is some more tinkering to do but… almost done. Lessons learned: never customize Taskspace.
The rest of Documentum projects were in the regular key. One had a particular innovation when we needed to integrate Documentum with another external store device, not Centera. Built the connector, works like a charm. Now the connector is also certified as designed for Documentum. Yey!
Sharepoint wasn’t the bing bang we thought it will be. Small projects, rushed, etc. I guess the customers are no yet understanding the fact that if you want SP to play in a way which is not out of the box you need to pay through the nose for the development effort. Not to mention that in many cases you need to trade off future upgrades to needed functionality.
And i finally saw the first big FileNet project. DMS, worfklow, capture.. one nice piece of requirements. Integration with the customer ERP.. etc. I must say that the default client of FileNet (Workspace) looks much better than Documentum’s Webtop. And behaves nicer. What i don’t get is the internal data model representation. Looks awful to me, i need to see how it behaves for large impementations (may objects, different schemas).
We also embraced Adobe LiveCycle and Connect. The next projects to come in 2010.
The economic downturn affected us quite a bit – especially the cashflow, not the project pipeline. But we managed to hire new people and not reduce paychecks.
We also launched a great Data Center, one of the best in the country. SaaS, Cloud stuff… the works.
So, 2009 was overall ok. Technically very demanding and opening new prospects for 2010.
See ya!
What to do next 30 December 2009
Posted by lopataru in Various.Tags: 2010, people, plans
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The year is ending and everyone looks back, makes predictions and chooses new year resolutions.
I’m trying hard to not make any. Looking at 2010 I see myself building ECM solutions, explore the information access area and learn new technologies.
I’m going to focus on my team and grow with my colleagues. I’m going to spend the time with that. Here! Sounds like new year resolution. Lol.
People, not technology. Technology can take care or itself for a while.
Content management in a box 15 September 2009
Posted by lopataru in ECM, Research.Tags: content management, ECM, xDB
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“Can I have two of those to go, please?”
A recent announcement from Oracle talks about an OLTP database machine. I’ll let you read the details and other comments in the official announcement and blogosphere.
When I received this pre-announcement over the weekend I appreciated the synergy between the two product lines: RDBMS and server. The RDBMS runs on a server.. why not make a specially tuned RDBMS to run on a specific hardware and also tune the hardware to generate a whooping performance for that specific software? While I’m not sure the new Oracle product does all this, I can imagine it.
Now, back to our nice little ECM world. CM software is captive to the RDBMS. Its performance depends on it. The licensing goes hand in hand… You rarely (if ever) can use a major ECM suite without a properly setup RDBMS. Why is that? Well, I can think of several reasons like ease of deployment, portability, reasonable performance, time-to-market… but the question still remains: “Why not have a CM server?” One box to deliver it all. A CM “appliance”. An “Apple CM”… all in one box, no replaceable battery.
As I know EMC products quite well, it’s obvious this would be a very nice use case for xDB. Let’s see if the R&D can pull it off – I would do it until end of 2010 if I was EMC and release it in 2011. I could really use a Documentum package which does not need a DB license/product and runs at least acceptable if not better.
Back to the “box” idea (I really like the Apple analogy) I’m not necessarily talking here about the “no database CMs” (like the list here). I’m talking about a full fledged, powerful and highly performance CM which is “in tune” with its medatata storage (based on a RDBMS or not….).
I’m pretty sure somebody already has this in their lab or even shop. I have a PhD thesis which is almost on this, and I’m probably not the most innovative guy in the world. I would love to learn about any such initiatives, but I’m too lazy today to search for it today… that’s another to do post-it.
It is being said that crisis times are the best drivers for innovation. Really?
My content management beginnings 9 September 2009
Posted by lopataru in ECM, Various.Tags: beginnings, ECM
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On my usual blog surf I’ve come to a memory lane post from Pie talking on first CM apps.
I now realize I was doing CM stuff since about ‘95. At that time I did not know what content management was (anyway, Wiki says “E”CM was coined in 2000).I was just building applications which managed semi-structured text documents, searched them in metadata and content, presented them to users in intranet and on the web… etc.
My first one was a legal documentation system which managed all the laws and some jurisprudence in my country. That summed up to about 100.000 documents which needed to be fulltext indexed, formatted in hypertext, presented, linked, updated daily… the works. We even won some awards on that
The first moment when I heard the term “Content Management” was when I worked for an European Union project to provide a distributed documentation system to a national network of citizen advice services. Then, a consultant from UK told me: “hey, you are building a content management system”. I nodded my head and carried on… had no idea what he actually meant. It was about ‘99.. I think.
All went along until 2004 when I met head-on Alchemy, Captiva, Legato and Documentum (all pre-EMC). I still remember the feeling when i first opened a VM with Documentum on it and trying to find out what to click to get to the juice. And I was definitely hooked…
My first Documentum app was built with dmbasic and workflow. Pretty powerful solution, done without any training and which worked several years daily… oh… those were the days…
Future of Content Management – another blog post 15 August 2009
Posted by lopataru in ECM.Tags: ECM, vision
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Why is everybody (eg: one, two, three, four (old), five (older)… me too) talking these days (and past) about the future of xCM? Because we might feel disappointed with the current having and need to look to a positive future?
I felt the urge to reply to the recent posts in my reach but I thought I’ll write here instead.
Everybody is right. (that was easy.. heh)
But… Lee touched a very important phenomenom.
xCM needs to be simple and beautifully executed in order to succeed. We aim to make it omnipresent/universal/almighty.
This can be achieved only if it’s simple (to us). Like google search was. Like email. Like web. Like databases. And beautifully executed. Like google, like email, like web, like databases.
We need to work very hard to do this. And we need to have a lucky idea which will take little time to do and then get picked up by millions of followers (twitted lately?). This is my dream.
/dream
Educate people. Research new ways. Invent. Enforce excellency. Leave back the failures.
Get to work (this was for myself )
Infomation management in vacation 7 August 2009
Posted by lopataru in Various.Tags: birthday, holiday, information management
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In the mind of my vacation I was sitting in a resort restaurant anjoying a very good meal.
While at that, the staff around us started singing “Happy Birthday” and brought to our table a cake with fireworks. It was for me. Completely unexpected and not arranged by any of my friends / family.
After the huge enjoyment, the professional inside me started to appreciate the excellent information management and related procedures. In order to pull that off, the hotel did: capture my birthday from my passport 2 days before when I checked in, followed the completely automated phone restaurant reservation system to find out where i was during that evening (there were about 8 restaurants for me to choose and there was no guarantee that i would choose one whatsoever) and then executed it beautifully in the following evenning, right on time before the deserts!
To top it, today when i got home, in the mail there was a nice happy birthday card from the hotel. What amazed me was that the card was sent to the address I actually live at, not to my passport address. This address was filled in by my spouse on the registration card when we checked in.
Now that’s information management!!
My respects to the hotel and their excellent orchestrated IT systems and guest relation procedures!
Who wants to guess if I will go back next year?
I’ll stop here and not talk about content management. I’m only thinking we need to get the same level of service to our ECM customers.
Summer ECM review 27 July 2009
Posted by lopataru in ECM.Tags: boring, ECM, vision
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Here I am in the middle of summer, looking forward to a small holiday. And while I’m at this and waiting for an email to arrive from one of my colleagues… I’m thinking to make a quick review of the ECM technologies I’ve used and seen lately.
The first thing which comes to my mind is that I almost didn’t see an ECM project where a vendor product can be used out of the box with only configurations to be done.
Personally I use (and like) SharePoint for storing documents in some scenarios. It works great as a replacement for file shares – on electronic documents. But that’s it. For almost anything else in this area you need to call in a developer. Because this is what SharePoint 2007 is right now: a development platform.
Now, take EMC Documentum. I’ll just not mention the end user products. Everything I’ve seen is not suited for ootb use in ECM scenarios – you simply pay too much for a set of functionalities which actually stand in your way when you want to do something. In almost all (90%) of my implementations we needed to develop on the platform in order to meed the business needs.
Don’t take me wrong… I don’t say this is not normal. It’s just that I strongly believe we need to change this.
On IBM FileNet… the same story. Different API, different limitations… same need for a developer. And IBM CM is definetely an “only developers” area.
And this is where my experience ends. Why? Because I didn’t find the time to play seriously with others (Alfresco, OpenText, Nuxeo… these are on my todo list)
So.. which is better? All. And none. It costs roughly the same to do the same ECM business requirements on all of these platforms. The difference comes from the other related services and activities (like installed base, integration with other products, skillset of existing IT at the vendor/partner/customer…).
So.. what’s next in these cloudy days? hehehe
No… not the coud. That’s old news. And anyway, as fellow bloggers said… it’s the same Mary with a different hat. It’s a way IT people find new ways to respond to business challenges while reusing the same technology. Not boring but dull.
I have the feeling that the big innovation must be already here. Buried somewhere in a garage/apartment company. In the brain of some enthusiasts which think outside the box. Where are you?
Content management is not easy. Especially when you need to take care of big organization inertia. And when you need to solve a problem “yesterday”, not “next year”. You can hardly keep innovating in this conditions. This is why big vendors probably can’t do it (reminds me of Virgin & “BA can’t get it up” stuff).
Anyway… i’ll just present my PhD thesis and go home. To my ECM projects on old and still rushed-to-market products. With vendor support which is unable to truly solve my issue. To escalation meetings where everybody tries to blame others…
Maybe after the holiday I’ll see the ECM vision. Somewehere between a jacuzzy and a glass of wine. Wish me luck!
cloud usage 16 June 2009
Posted by lopataru in ECM.Tags: cloud services, ECM
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This is more like a microblog entry…
I’m thinking of a way to use Cloud services with traditional ECM.
Storage ease of access (large enterprises move slowly with aquisitions), disaster recovery scenarios and content accessibility to distributed users.
These come to me as nice benefits.
I’ll research how these fit with the ECM vendors strategy. Is this interesting during these times? Or it’s just a nice gizmo?
Hmmmm…
