Here’s some things we just could let pass by. 

Maybe many of you have already seen it but I was surprised to see that SUN Microsystems had changed their ticker symbol from SUNW to JAVA back in August.  It may be GNU to you but Scott McNealy won’t let you forget where it came from.   

And since we’re on missed events, Lotusphere, the 15^th annual IBM Lotus Note user conference, was held last month in Disney World.  Neither sibling, IBM Content Manager nor IBM FileNet, was available for comment. 

I’ve read it argued that CMS vendors in general might not have to worry so much about SharePoint competition because its only a Collaborative Content Application. The rest of the models are safe. If you have a web content management (WCMS) or a records management product there is no reason to worry because MOSS is really just about Office documents. I don’t disagree that it is mostly a collaboration tool today. Unfortunately no one bothered to tell Microsoft that this is all it is. I assure you they aspire to much more. If you don’t believe me, read it from them. Despite their acknowledgment of the role ISV’s play, their consistent use of ECM services nomenclature belies the strategy.

From a customer’s perspective, what’s wrong with SharePoint really. The answer? - nothing time won’t fix. It is no worse than any of the other major ECM players were 10 years ago. (more…)

Last Thursday, EMC announced it acquired PI Corp. Like many of you I had never heard about PI. But I really like naming conventions. Many of you missed the one from last week’s post that still makes me laugh. Alchemy was a science that failed in its attempt to turn ordinary metals into gold. PI makes me think of a number that goes on and on forever.

The PI site reminds me of Relevance, Documentum $3.65M acquisition in 1998. (more…)

Sometime between the age 30 and 45 men loose their minds. It’s called a mid-life crisis. You go to your high school reunion compare yourself to the jocks, cheerleaders and geeks you went to school with and take stock of your life. The old joke is that you hit this phase and get a new wife, a new car and a new job. Congratulations Microsoft - at 33 you’ve hit your crisis.

I can’t help but think that Microsoft took a good look at Apple and decided to start dating again. (more…)

This week’s announcement from Microsoft that they will be giving away developer software free to students and the BLOG posts on the topic, left me with two very different opinions I wanted to share.   

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Johnny Gee’s recent post on a Migration Dilema describes a client’s reluctance to create a taxonomy when migrating content into Documentum. The argument from the client being, “if the old system didn’t need it, why does Documentum?” I’ve heard this more than once myself and this kind of question is usually followed by a complaint that if Documentum is so expensive, why can’t it do exactly what I want it to. (usually this translates to “make it behave exactly like the product its replacing”)

Before answering the question, as integrators we have to understand exactly what our role is in the engagement. Are we contractors or consultants. There is a difference. (more…)

I was reading Johnny Gee’s BLOG and his article “Why can’t search be more like Google?” and I flashed back to a day in 1998 when several of us were invited to the Demo Room of Building 1 at Documentum. There the ten of us were introduced to Project Alchemy, which would later become the first web client from Documentum. We were given a 45 minute demo of the product and then asked if there were any questions. After a few moments of silence someone in the audience broke the dam and suddenly the questions started flowing, “why this” and “why not that?” Finally our barrage of questions was stopped by another question, “well what does a web UI look like then?” Our combined audience voice replied, “Yahoo!”

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Every CMS vendor I know of is falling all over themselves to release a SnarePoint connector. (yes I meant to spell it that way) It’s like the scene in Shrek where Donkey bounces up and down yelling “Pick Me! Pick Me!” Ektron just announced their integration a few weeks ago. Marko covered the Case Management Framework from Open Text just the other day. On the surface it seems like a great idea to take advantage of the 1 billion dollars in sales the Microsoft has managed to amass and give users something useful to do with it. The problem is - as SnarePoint matures, it will improve. There is no incentive for Microsoft to hold back and not add capabilities that real CMS vendors offer while you are out there peddling their wares for them. Eventually, past and potential customers of these pimped out packages are going to start to say “Tell me again. Why do I need you too? ” The fact will be - they won’t need you. What are you going to do then?

Well if this week’s announcement that Open Text will be offering case management on top of Microsoft SharePoint isn’t a wink across the bar to Microsoft then it must be a white flag of surrender. The support that they are offering the SharePoint platform has one major component missing that similar applications have, an integration to their repository and some of the features they do mention I believe Microsoft would say they already do have them like records classification, search, and a rich client, though not desktop. It seems to me like they’re giving up and basically saying look we have a client that works on top of MOSS and if their’s been one major selling point for MOSS it has been that they have a great UI. But I guess the real question is how much will the product cost. Maybe someone at Open Text read our blog.

Note - For those of you not familiar with how a press release works the fact that there is neither an “About Microsoft” section nor a Microsoft press contact means that this was written exclusively by OpenText with no endorsement from Microsoft. Also known as, “this was not a joint announcement.”

Well looks like SDL did it again. Today they announced the acquisition of Idiom Technologies for $22m. This comes not even 2 1/2 years after they acquired Trados for $60m. If you’re wondering who they are and why you should care - they were the three market leaders in translation management and now there’s no contender in site.

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