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…
Open Source and ECM 26 May 2009
Posted by lopataru in ECM.Tags: ECM, open source
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I and my team do ECM implementations using tehnology from most of the guys in Gartner’s leaders quandrant. EMC, IBM (both) and MS (cough!).
I can’t say I’m particularly happy with the products they have, but in general those products get us quicker to meet the customer needs. Which needs are not always purely centered on “content” or pure BPM. Content might be just passing through the picture so the solution gets to be tagged “ecm”. The “E” being included because the customer is a big organization, not necessarily because the solution addressed the whole company.
We always strive to get the customer buy the whole ECM concept, since we would really like to to it in most cases. Sometimes we succeed (about 3-4 times a year)… sometimes we don’t… and we get to stick to the “departmental level app on top of a much more powerful platform”.
Every now and then we play with the idea “what if we would build our own ECM?”… Yeah… i know. That’s a subject for another entire blog and forum… hehehe
So we live a normal life inside this space.
We got used to take SharePoint into almost any discussions with a new customer… Anyway, I have used SP in some very nice solutions so… it’s absolutely fine.
These days something strange happened. A private company customer (not a public organization) told us it’s thinking of building its solution on open source. This is the first time I heard a CIO level of a large enteprise discussing the possibility of using Open Source for one of its platforms. I’ve heard this from public / state-owned organizations. But not from a Top100 private company.
I like the idea. The “techie” part in me is thrilled to it. But the “manager” & “real life solution provider” gnomes inside my head start to nod.
I know Alfresco and Nuxeo (just to name some) have nice products and probably a very successful installation base but I have rarely seen them in this area. Maybe the market I’m in is not into it… yet. Who knows.
I’m not judging the technical capabilities. On a lot of items I know already these vendors outperform the “traditional” ones.
I’m worried about the ecosystem around them. About the technical skills to manage installations. About roadmap predictability. About the needed culture change in IT in order to work with it.
And I’m not counting on enthusiasts who can make anything work. I’m thinking of the average IT Joe who needs to be a service manager for such a system. I blogged about difference between Windows and Unix administration tasks. I blogged about the decrease in IT quality. These things count on the “Enterprise” level. You can’t never have enough enthusiasts there (strangely enough, such enthusiasts exist more in the public sector).
At least this is my view, right now. After a beer and looking forward for some sleep.
And to end like in famous tv shows, with some questions:
How is Open Source used in Enterprise level (from the beneficiarry point of view)?
Is it different to sell and implement from the vendor / isv / var point of view?
Oracle aims at SQL Server 21 April 2009
Posted by lopataru in Various.Tags: database, microsoft, mysql, Oracle, sql server, sun
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In a surprising move (if you’ve seen this coming then you deserve a lot of respect) Oracle announced the acquisition of Sun. Or, more specific.. Sun agrees to be acquired by Oracle.
While this has been all over the news in the last 24 hours, one thing struck me (and some others): Oracle now owns MySQL which is a direct competitor (and I can elaborate on this a lot) to…. queue in drums… Microsoft’s prized possession, SQL Server.
So, now Oracle competes directly with Microsoft SQL Server on all fronts (high end and low end). While on high end there is usual not much to compete with… Adding MySQL to the offering will now give a lot of leverage to Oracle, as mrs. Katz implied in the aquisition comment.
If Oracle plays its cards well, there will be rough times for Microsoft. And others.
If i have to rate this acquisition, it would be almost a 10. No other top 10 IT aquisitions in the last years come to mind to approach this rating. This one points to so many directions I cannot count 
.
Document management with SQL Server 20 March 2009
Posted by lopataru in ECM, Research.Tags: document management, ECM, sql server, Sql Server 2008
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This is a placeholder post, I’ll update it as time goes by.
Currently I’m building a presentation to show to the IT community how SQL Server can be used to build Document Management systems.
I have built (me and my team) many applications on SQL Server and several for DM. So i need to structure my experience a bit and give back to the community while researching what anyone else did similar and what the new version of SQL 2008 brings to the table.
If you whish to share your thought, feel free..
later edit:
Of course I could not update the post as I researched…. but here are the outcomes:
Main topics of interest when trying to build a DMS solution on top of SQL 2008:
- Integrated Fulltext Search
- FILESTREAM data
- Remote Blob Store (RBS)
Other significant SQL Server 2008 functionalities:
- Backup compression
- Data compression
- Data encryption
- New DATE/TIME field (UTC)
- Improved XML processing (with Lax validation)
- Improved reporting services (who doesn’t need reports ? )
- last, but not least: Sparse Columns
- more here
Full Text search
Now being integrated (and rewritten), the FTS engine provides more functions to the user and developer. The performance is kept somehow like in 2005 but some areas show significant improvements.
Fot the brave enough to use FTS in 2005 and previous versions, the migration options need to be considered (3 in total: rebuild, import, reset). Rebuild is needed especially if you want to take advantage of the new stemming and word-breaking rules and languages.
Nice things: stop words are now in the database. So they are accesible, programmable and transportable. They are also not only language dependent but you can also define other “set building” rules.
The thesaurus is still in XML but now is lazy cached and can be updated without restarting the server (yey!). Note that it behaves a little different then in 2005. So you need to take care when migrating your XML files.
Cool stuff: troubleshooting functions! Something always needed to look into the FT “magic”. baing able to see what keywords were indexed for a particular document / collection is very nice. To see it from SQL is even nicer. To be able to see how a query is parsed and transformed is great. I’m also happy since I can see how the stemmer and thesaurus work for a particular case.
Some advice: take care if you have many keywords (x 10 million). Use fast disks, IO is very important. Use 64 bits: 3 GB of RAM is usually not enough. Don’t confuse FREETEXT and CONTAINS, use them wisely.
BLOB related news
First of all, please don’t use IMAGE and TEXT/NTEXT fields anymore. They will no longer be supported / encouraged by Microsoft.
You can use VARBINARY(MAX), but you hit the 2 GB limit with it. Use the FILESTREAM modifier (new in 2008) to kill that limit.
FILESTREAM makes content to be stored in the NTFS drive. Nice. And tricky at the same time. Good for streaming, not so good for frequent updates. Good for big files, not so good for many files (especially when having short backup windows).
Nice: works from TSQL as well as Win32. Not so nice: behaves a little differently in TSQL vs. Win32 (transaction isolation level, performance – not necessarly better in Win32).
So, you really have to understand it before using. You can get in some not so obvious pitfalls. But is a good thing.
Remote Blob Store – RBS
Who does not know what CAS (Content Addressable Storage) is probably does not need it.
Is not another column type, it’s an API to be implemented by CAS vendors mainly and used by applications.
Somehow, it’s similar with EBS on SharePoint. In fact, there is a competition between the two (some nice cover is here), and I also feel that RBS is the way to go (regardless of the current limitation about accesing the context of the Blob).
EMC already has a RBS connector for Centera. Nice.
So, 2008 brings a lot of nice things on the table. Let me know when you use them.
Sun and IBM 19 March 2009
Posted by lopataru in Various.add a comment
Or, “there can be only one” – to quote a slashdotter.
I was reading this last evening as the news talk about the feeding frenzy which is seen in the market.
Such a huge deal would be sure to attract the attention of monopoly aware government organizations, both in the States and worldwide. I’m curious if it can stand this type of inquiry.
Anyway, if this happens the IT market will change significantly for a lot of people and while this does not directly touch the ECM space, I believe it will affect us (i see Lee feels this also).
Due to the lack of comment on the topic from Sun and IBM officials, i think there is definitely something going on and we might have to see a new and bigger giant appear in the IT space.
Is traditional ECM up for high performance 9 March 2009
Posted by lopataru in ECM.Tags: ECM, performance
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Last week I stumbled over the WordPress statistics for February.
Impressive. That got me thinking on how I would be able to implement this kind of backend system with a traditional (read “top Gartner stuff”). And I shivered inside while thinking of IBM CM, Documentum, FileNet… SharePoint (lol!).
I remember once I’ve seen a support issue with one of the above vendors in which the administration tool could not display the size of filestores bigger that 2 GB. And I believe the issue is still there, after 2-3 years. Tragic.
Imagine a customer seeing this (and they do) and saying… “Well.. what kind of Enterprise system is this? If it cannot show correctly storage spaces over 2 GB? How can I trust it with my Terabytes?”
My practice based experience tells me that a large scale performance cannot be normally achieved with Enterprise grade software. You have a better chance with some high skilled professionals (not many, 4-7 should be enough) which can put together some “indie” software.
In my work, I rarely (read “never”) seen a ECM system handle a load similar with the WordPress one. ECM in my area tends to cap normally at about several million items and a few TB of space. While requiring a huge deluge of hardware (I can’t still understand why on earth would I need minimmum 4 GB or RAM for an Index Server? Even in the smallest install)
You out there…. Working on ECM… I would like to know your statistics.
Documentum 6.5 ramblings, or something 2 March 2009
Posted by lopataru in ECM.Tags: documentum
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I just noticed that another month passed by without me writing anything here.
Obviously because I’m busy… same (lame) excuse. Not really. Of course the job is always demanding, but getting 30 minutes a day to ramble about something can’t be that hard.
So I pulled myself and logged back here. Let’s talk about my recent Documentum experiences.
At this stage we are undergoing some D 6.5 implementations. SP1, just to be sure.
I’m not involved technically first hand, and the last time I got my hands on it was about 4-5 months ago. This is to settle expectations straight… you’re not about to see any technical revelations here.
First thing: “shit! is different!” the whole install process I mean. Where’s my DocApp? No more docapps, use the “.dar”. Learn Eclipse… headless.. that is. The Eclipse, not me. Not yet.
Ok, basic stuff works. TaskSpace… almost ok. Let’s move to the Imaging Services… Brr… Strike 1… Strike 2… Use Webtop.
I promise myself I’ll get back on this. Never did. And now my colleagues suffer the same things. Poor them.
But it moves faster. Lot faster. Then I increased the RAM available to the virtual machine. Shouldn’t have done that.
Note to self: don’t increase the memory for virtual machines upon the exhaustion of the host memory. Swapping is bad..
Business Process Manager now. Done. All ok. BP Services? Not yet. Later.
Oooo… BAM. I mean Business Activity Monitor. I feel like Dee-Dee in the laboratory. Same effect.
Rollback to VM snapshot.
At this point I think: there must be an easy way.
Then I read in the installation manual: “rename the XXX file to YYY file and then run setup.exe” (names were changed to protect the innocent). As a last line on the page. Why the %^&*() do I need to rename a file which is provided in the installation kit? Oh well.. this why we are payed the good bucks.. can only imagine how SAP looks like.Oh, stop, I know that also… tough job.
Wanna try Annotation Services? With 6.5 ? Sure…. bring it on. It worked! That brought the spirit up. For a moment.
Today it does not work anymore. Looking for some LiveCycle piece? Good luck!
Great. Now what? Laugh hysterically and get back on it.
You know, Oracle installation kits are free on the Internet. You know why? Because it takes a skilled person to install it properly. Go figure.
Why am I telling you this? Because next week when all the puzzle pieces will be nicely put toghether I can look here with my colleagues and laugh.
And since you read it all the way up to here: let’s build a HA environment toghether. And put some Document Sciences on it to spice it up.
PhD paper done. Phew! 19 January 2009
Posted by lopataru in ECM, Research.3 comments
Finally, after a long time i have now a complete version of my PhD thesis.
I would like to ellaborate more on this, but after spending 4 days in a mountain cottage secluded in front of my laptop… i simply can’t.
Now i just need to publish some articles and present my creation to the public. Behold
Kickoff 2009 3 January 2009
Posted by lopataru in ECM, Various.add a comment
Just entered 2009 and making new year resolutions? I hope I’m past that moment since i just read somewhere that such decisions are bad for your health.
What will 2009 mean for Content Management? Nothing special, I guess.. But i think the whole IT industry is going to pass through some good times. In the last few years i’ve seen some decay in the overall industry practices. A lot of marketing and little substance. Everybody wanted to be ahead of the competitor, to show (keyword: “show”) it’s the best… blah blah blah..
I expect 2009 to be an year in which the industry is forced to mature itself.. maybe because of the so much mediatized financial crisis . Thinking of it, this crisis reminds me of Share Point. lol
In the CM field we will probably see a lot of talk around “compliance” solutions.
A lot of talk around increased efficiency (everyone will want that, won’t they?).
The major ECM vendors (IBM, EMC, Oracle, MS) will try to grow their direct consulting practice to snatch a bigger part of the pie (not only licenses).
A lot of focus will go to open source (it’s “cheap”, isn’t it?).
Outsourcing will get more consolidated to major players. I see many small single-client outsourcing companies slowly dying. Which will bring more qualified personnel to the market. Please, do come in!
Cutting costs? Only the non-productive ones probably. Who is smart should invest in R&D at these times. And collect on its existing knowhow.
Low budgets from customets? Eh.. what’s new ? it was always this way. Maybe they say it a little more these days, but we should get used to smaller budgets until we can provide really good quality (nobody argues about price when buys a Bentley or Ferrari).
So, what’s in for 2009? Nothing special, just aim to be better.
Happy New Year!
Snail install 21 November 2008
Posted by lopataru in Various.4 comments
Today I have been involved in a product upgrade on the Documentum platform.
It was a service pack install, usually not very complicated. Although this blog is about content management… i’ll not talk about this right now. In fact, i will talk about the upgrade experience.
Before the installation i wrote down a complete procedure to follow. The installation itslef would be done by a person which is not very familiar with Documentum so it was pretty explanatory.
The installation needed these kind of operations:
- a lot of file and folder copying
- various users to be used
- GUI as well as command line operations
- file contents comparison
- file edits
- folder contents comparison
- restore from backup archives
And now i come to the pain point: these needed to be done remotely on Unix machines.
On my “home” Unix environment the operations lasted about 2 hours, without rush.
In the today’s installation they lasted 7 hours.
Let’s say that the person performing the upgrade procedure was not very talented although he was quite knowledgeable at Unix (quite fluent in command line tricks).
I think the reason is the fact the Unix environment (Solaris based) did not offer enough support for such operations. This meant that the operations which needed to be done became very labour intensive for a “regular” admin.
I give some examples:
- compare 2 folder contents and synchronize them using *nix native commands
- compare 2 files using only less/cat and vi
- move files between complex folder structures named in a similar way using command line
On my “home” environment i have some nice tools to make this easier, but on a corporate, “bare” environment these tools do not exist and you need to rely on the trustful vi/grep/cp/less/cat commands. While these commands are excellent and definitely more powerful than the normal Windows counterparts, the effort needed from an average user (let’s not call it “admin”) is far bigger.
Since all of these operations needed to be done like this, it needed extensive attention (looking at each command some tens of seconds and making checks and double-checks to make sure the result is indeed what we needed).
My conclusion is that even though Unix is arguably better than Windows on server side, you need a highly skilled personnel to operate it and to make use of proper aditional tools (or scripts) to administer it efficiently.
I’m sure any *nix expert out there would jump up and bash me for saying this, and would be ready to prove to me he can do anything faster in *nix that on Windoze. I agree with this. But I’m talking about the average dude operating the corporate infrastructure. Keywords: “average”, “dude” and “corporate”.
Am I really wrong? Or *nix installs of software usually take longer than Redmond ones?
