I was inspired by two recent posts. Pie’s invitation to meet him at EMC World and Chuck Hollis’ post on transparency in blogging.

I’ll be manning the Armedia booth (#336) at EMC World in Las Vegas this year and I’d love for you to stop by and visit. I’d like to tell you that I have lofty goals to investigate the inner workings of EMC and uncover some remarkable technical insight. The truth is I’ll be there for 4 days of shameless self promotion. I hope you’ll stop by and chat a while about how much we miss Workspace, swap war stories and talk about how bright our futures look with all things EMC. (and SharePoint)

Marko will be prowling the floor in his BMOC shirt. I’ll try to come up with some sort of fitting reward for anyone who hunts him down and says something witty and insulting.

At heart, I’m still a geek though and I hope to learn quite a lot this year. I am most looking forward to learning as much as I can about what they plan on doing with eRoom, what their strategy really is for SharePoint and seeing what others are doing with Documentum and RIA’s.

We’ll see you in Vegas.

Lee and I were talking and one of the most common questions we hear from clients implementing or managing a content management system is how to calculate a return on their system.  Companies end up spending hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on a CMS system with no idea of how to track the value it is bringing to their organization.

There is no one simple formula to calculate ROI for a CMS system.  Instead what we have discovered is there are a series of calculations one can make to understand the costs and saving of the system.   These numbers can then be used to calculate the return on the implementation.  To introduce these calculations we decided to start a series of posts, with this being the inaugural issue.  Being the first one we’ll start with a simple, yet regularly asked question, how much storage do I need?

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I am amazed at how (at least in public) old time “Documentum” people continue to be dismissive of Open Text. I’ve written here before that it seemed that OT’s acquisition strategy and close ties to Microsoft seemed at odds with a takeover bid but In case you haven’t noticed, Open Text is making money. A lot of it. With a market cap approaching 1.9 billion and license revenue up, they are trending much better than Documentum and it is  just too much cash to ignore. (more…)

After an uncomfortably long silence we are seeing more about EMC’s OEM strategy as it relates to Content Management. The press release adresses five key areas.

• A formal rebranding of the X-Hive XML server and a reference from www.doczone.com 
• IRM and a customer highlight for a SaaS evidence management application
• The OEM content server is mentioned with no customer reference
• Application Xtender is presented as a peer to content server
• Captiva remains the cornerstone for capture 

It is clear that Content Management and Archiving has great plans for X-Hive.  CMA seems relieved to finally have a competitive strategy for the component content management space.  Similarly, RSA offerings have equal prominence but the most intersting note is what was not said. Only RSA is called out as being embedded.  No mention is made of how the customer handles the CMS related functions. (more…)

Generally speaking, if you can’t tell me what a buzzword means in a sentence or two, I dismiss the term as half baked and relegate it to the bingo chart. When I first heard the term Mashup in relation to software, the poor girl at the trade show was unable to pass this test so I took the chotchkies and moved on. Well that was several years ago and the products from the big players (IBM, Microsoft, etc.) are starting to accumulate. It’s time to take notice and figure out what this means to you. (more…)

Imagine this scene later this year.  You’re driving down the autobahn in your new 2008 BMW and want to grab dinner but you don’t know where.  So you move your hand over to your iDrive controller on your BMW ConnectedDrive to select restaurants on your 2”x5” screen.  As you enter text entry mode to type in the name of the restaurant, your window (lowercase “w”) erupts in blue as you drive into a bridge embankment at 150mph.  It the ultimate blue screen of death.  It surprises me that every device these days requires the touch input.

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