“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?

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…

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 )

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.

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!

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…

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?

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 .

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.

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.