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…
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.
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 
.
Sun and IBM 19 March 2009
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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.
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?
Clouds, virtualization and other hip stuff going kaboom 13 August 2008
Posted by lopataru in Various.Tags: cloud computing, crash, IT strategy
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After reading the news the other day, i had an idea to put a blog entry but never got to.
Today I saw a post on bmoc and I began writing a comment on it. Was too long, so i evolved it to a blog post:
The recent mediatized cloud crash of Linkup and also the massive VMWare bug comes to prove that “innovative” IT technologies come with an inherent risk of their own.
Both had somewhat straighforward solutions (some of the many):
1. just have a decent backup solution.
2. don’t use license management in enterprise class software.
But technology cannot solve all on its own. You need other enforcement which works in real life. Like Marko showed with the US Postal Service sample.
It so happens that the company I’m in provides also some sort of “cloud” services. I’m not going to say we’re better than others, but one thing i know we have is insurance and this is included in one to one contracts with all cloud customers (each contract is tailor made, not just an “accept terms and conditions” web check box).
Of course, in case of a disaster no one can provide the lost data (if it’s really lost meaning no backup exists).
Therefore, I think that anyone which does not complete it’s IT infrastructure with additional material procedures likes to live on the edge.
On a last minute info, i have just learned that one of our customers was running its servers on a RAID array which was since several months in “destroy” mode since all spare and redundant hdd’s were dead and no one noticed. Comes to prove the point.
If i were to be sadic, i would say “no problem, more money for us.. we’ll just charge a hefty sum to rebuild its infrastructure”. But the problem is it never should have happened in some persons would have acted more professional and think outside the technology for a minute.
Are programming skills fading? 14 February 2008
Posted by lopataru in Various.Tags: education, industry, programming
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For several years i thought i noticed that the programming skills of the majority of ones around me was fading.
I talked with some college professors, with other managers/IT professionals and they confirmed the same. Then I thought: “Maybe I’m (we’re) wrong, and looking at it too influenced by my generation (i really believe we could rocked mountains).” I pushed the idea to the back of my head.
Recently a news on shlashdot caught my attention. It basically points to an article written by 2 professors and discusses exactly what I was experiencing.
I’ll not go into detail since the Slashdot post has a lot of comments and the article is very good it itself. No particular value i can add there.
One thing I can say: I am in not in US. I am in Europe. I am in a country which is quite proud of its programming professionals and i have a lot of success stories on that side. We tend to ‘export’ a lot of engineers and almost half (really!) of my college generation is now working for Microsoft, Google and others in top positions. And the problem happens also here. So it must be universal.
What happened? Well, since I’m a C++/Assembler originating guy i think Java is one problem . Or the similar programming environments. It makes things too easy. Generally, programmers will forget / not learn the fundamentals of computer programming (yes, assembler, memory, pointers, cpu time, pipeline, IPC…) and they will natively program poorly. Yes, there are excellent Java developers out there. I know some. I’m not talking about them (praise to you guys and galz)! But I’m talking about the majority (i might start a storm coming to me right now).
I keep wondering where are the programs which ran in 48K of memory? Or even 640 K. I remember playing 3D games on a Spectrum computer. Why do i need right now 4 GB of memory for a full text index server? I remember building a similar one to run in less than 8 MB.
Why it takes ages for a Java portal to startup? On a dual core server? With Gigs of memory to spare?
Why do i see NullPointerException so many times? Who the f… is writing that code? (in my opinion NullPointerException is clearly a developer error and should not appear to the user. Ever!)
I’ll stop ranting right now. I simply want to know if you feel the same thing.
Are the programming skills fading? Why?
ECM shopping spree 17 January 2008
Posted by lopataru in ECM, Various.Tags: Captovation, ECM, Oracle
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2008, Jan: Microsoft buys FAST, Oracle buys BEA, Oracle buys Captovation. And January still has some days left.. who’s next?
2007 marked a long list of consolidations in the ECM market (and connex areas) , seems like 2008 is no different
As a digression from ECM… today I entered the Oracle page for products and services. Funny thing: before listing their products they provide an almost bigger list of “Aquired products”. Lol.
I cannot help but noticing the fact that Oracle wants to move aggressively in the ECM space. Buying Stellent last year, now acquiring a tightly integrated document capture software. In combination with the database technology and application server / portal which they own… this comes toghether as a powerful combination. Not to mention killing BEA (yes, for me it seems in this way).
Who’s next? Will SAP buy OpenText (they already resell it since 2007)? Will HP buy it? 
