Confessions of an eBiz Junkie

Web 2.0 and ECM

Yesterday EMC announced Documetum ECM 6.5... Despite the 6.5 label, this is much more than a point release. From my POV, it represents a fundamental shift in the ECM space.

While there's no shortage of cool new tools under the hood of 6.5, it's the marriage of Web 2.0 with the more traditional ECM capabilities that I believe to be most exciting. As noted in a previous post, my world consists of two very different landscapes... There's the world of structured data - object models, content policies, versioning, etc;. In this world, things are easy to find - Everything is organized and categorized - It's a nice place to be. In fact, one might consider a relaxing little vacation here. Think a nice week in Hawaii.

Just down the road is a world of unorganized and unstructured information... Content comes from all over the place. No rhyme or reason - virtually anything goes. Anyone can contribute what they want, when they want, and they make up their own rules as they go. The information here is invaluable... Some of the best knowledge you'd want to get your hands on. But, it can be difficult to find what you need. Likely, there's a few of these little places all disconnected from each another. While it's invaluable info, the masses may have have difficulty consuming the information. Don't get me wrong... It's a really cool place too - it's just different. Think New Orleans during Mardi Gras.

Screenshots from CenterStage

The new Documentum helps bring these worlds together - leveraging the strengths of each. CenterStage enables easier contribution and collaboration among teams (There's a beta sign up here). Federated search and mobile connectivity are among the new offerings. "My Documentum" enables knowledge workers to access and work on their information in offline mode. Media WorkSpace was designed to help global teams collaborate on rich media assets. This is but a sample of what's new in 6.5.

As someone responsible for the overall online ecosystem at a large global company, this is big. It's going to change the ways companies create, collaborate on and consume information.

As you can imagine, there's much buzz around the launch. Some relevant links -

Perspective from Mark Lewis. President of EMC's CMA Division
EMC Software Architect Craig Randall's POV
The Knowledge Worker Blog on EMC Developers Network
Peter Hagopian of InformationWeek

New Bloggers in the 'Sphere

Well, not new per se, but new to me anyways. It looks as though these guys have been part of the conversation for some time...

I recently came across Chad Sakak's blog - Virtual Geek. Chad's the Sr Director of our VMWare strategic alliance. On his blog, Chad discusses all things virtual. A good read - although in full disclosure, some of it's a bit hardcore... Trying to follow a couple of Chads posts gave me one of those 'ice cream headaches'... Man they can hurt.

Also of note, Craig Randall is sharing his thoughts over at Craig's Musings. Craig is a Software Architect within our CMA division and blogs about software services, service-oriented architecture and all sorts of neat things ECM.

Two great blogs from fellow EMC'ers. Be sure to stop by and say hello. Of course, you can check more of our provocative and awe-inspiring bloggers here.

Social Software and CMS

It's been hard to catch up with all of the blogs, tweets, emails, etc that piled up as I traversed the US and made my way to the Golden State. Of course, even when things are 'normal' I find it challenging to keep up with the plethora of nuggets coming from friend and Sr. Forrester Analyst Jeremiah.

Earlier this week, Jeremiah posted an interesting blog around CMS vendors and the opportunities afforded through social software. Thanks for starting this timely and relevant conversation, JO.

As you'd imagine, we've been discussing this topic for some time now (For context, EMC's Documentum Family of products is all about managing enterprise content). We use Documentum to manage hundreds of thousands  of web assets in over 50 locales across our web properties. Information life cycle capabilities ensure information is stored on the most appropriate storage tier, workflows allow information to flow seamlessly both inside and outside the enterprise, object model standards ensure the right information is delivered to the right audience at the right time, content versioning and protection ensures we adhere to regulatory compliance, etc;.

Suffice it to say the information across our web platforms is well managed.

On the other hand, we also have several instances of community offerings running throughout the company. Some part of a centralized effort, others having evolved through organic evolution. In virtually all cases, the data is unstructured. No capabilities to assign information policies, immature workflow capabilities when they do exist, etc;.

As social computing continues to establish footprint within the enterprise, it's become crystal clear that the same opportunities and capabilities afforded through traditional CMS systems are needed within the social landscape.

I look forward to the day when a product team can collaborate on messaging in a Wiki document; engage the community as appropriate through the creation process; once near complete, fire off multi-tiered workflow that runs the asset(s) through necessary review before taking it outside the enterprise for translation; and finally return to complete final review; then automatically be dropped in the most relevant spot online... Oh right, then to set off automated life-cycle policies some time later to re-engage the community to ensure the information is still relevant. The very notion makes me giddy.

I've seen products where 'total integration' means the vendor offers a handful of out of the box plugins. Beyond that, good luck recruiting a small army of IT folks to completely customize your environment to realize integration. I've yet to see the right solution where this is all brought together in a seamless offering.

But, now that I'm here in CA., I've had a chance to work a bit more closely with our Content Management and Archiving team. It's evident to me that these folks have been thinking about this.. a lot. The day I look forward to is much closer than one might think... Count EMC in on your show and tell event, Jeremiah. And again, thanks for starting this conversation.

Advancing RSS

So, we all know that RSS = Really Simple Syndication. If you didn't, definitely check this out. I suspect the next generation will be something along the lines of NSSS (or Not-So-Simple Syndication). OK, so nifty acronyms aren’t really my thing.

Like most, we’d launched vanilla RSS some time back - delivering the latest and greatest information (largely public) to our users. We then moved the offering across our Intranet and Extranet properties, and continue to see solid user adoption.

The problem as I see it as that everyone is still pushing content at a relatively generic level.  As example, our Extranet site serves Customer, Partner and Field audiences (we call these identities). Each of these identities have their own distinct view, navigation, permissions, etc;. In addition, depending on the product / services you have, you become entitled to very granular assets within the site. Lastly, users are encouraged to customize the site via preferences (what vertical are you in, what's your operating environment, etc;). Traditional RSS does not support the complexity of a highly dynamic B2B site.

From my perspective, real value arrives when we can enable users to get very granular in terms of their subscriptions.

We're now sizing an effort that I believe will take RSS to the next level. By integrating our entitlements engine (RSA), our user's preferences (BEA) and our CMS system (Documentum) - We will be in a position to offer a dynamic and real-time subscription interface, assembled on the fly and derived based on all of the information for that particular user. When complete, a customer will be able to subscribe at the individual product level and, with great specificity, select if I want all information relevant to my specific product, software updates only, critical updates only, etc ., etc ., etc. Impressive when looking at over 300 products and half a million users.

It goes without saying that this would not be possible without a solid data object model across our content assets (probably a good topic for a subsequent post).  And by completely integrating with Documentum, content updates can be pushed to users in real time - When an asset matching my entitlements & subscription preferences is made available, the push through our XML feed will be immediate.

So I'm curious - Has anyone seen this done before? Granular RSS capabilities across protected content seems like a big miss. If someone's tackled it, I've yet to find it...

Cheers,
LD