From the category of - why doesn’t everybody do this - OpenText has announced the acquisition of Spicer Corporation to form their own content viewing, annotation and redaction product. Some major ECM vendors have elected in the past to remain “viewer” agnostic and left this to ISV’s. EMC/Documentum for example, after abandoning their docviewer product of the 90’s developed a long relationship with Informative Graphics and has remarketed their Brava! product - but they curiously opted not to bundle this viewer when they released TaskSpace. Other third party options exist (Snowbound,et.al.) but more customers expect their CMS to do more than uberfilemanagement out of the box. Embedded viewers are such a natural fit. Just ask Stellent (Oracle) .

In case you haven’t run across it yet - I highly recommend the series Craig Randall is doing tracing the evolution of Documentum Client API’s from the Primary InterOp API to the present day preferred method DFS.

One of the more interesting tidbits is the revelation that one of the reasons to abandon PIA was that DFC has exceeded the number of methods allowable by a given interface in COM (255) - thus the need for a new bridge. Has it ever occurred to anyone that maybe - just maybe - there are too MANY functions in DFC. Llike me, DFC needs to go on a diet - the comparatively limited options in DFS suggests you might be surprised by how much you can do with the basics.

All those choices but nothing as useful as the IDfSession.getWhatIMeantToAskFor() method I have always wanted.

Oracle announce the acquisition of Skywire last week and it highlights the difference between the growth and acquisition strategies of the different players. For those unfamiliar with it, Skywire boasts of having 1450 insurance customers. Clearly a CEVA acquisition. The pattern is not exclusive but this acquisition is not unlike Peoplesoft, Siebel or other major function acquisitions where they acquired strong players in a vertical built on their technology. Contrast this with EMC acquistions over the last twelve months in the CM space. Document Sciences and X-Hive are both clearly platform buys. So why does Oracle go after vertical applications instead of platforms? They do it because they can. (more…)

I am not as enamored as Alan Pelz-Sharpe with the negotiating prowess of ECM sales reps. I rarely take issue with his commentary but in his recent post on ECM buying tips, Alan suggests customers should beware when going to the negotiating table against the superior abilities of big vendor account managers. I don’t disagree that these folks are professionals and sell for a living but I like to think that customers have a distinct advantage over the vendor and are equally bright and capable when informed. As customers you should never forget - you control the money. (more…)

The cost of content is the most basic level of measure in the content management space.  If there is one basic measure that library services, the core of content management, should bring to any installation is a reduction in the Cost of Content.  By simply calculating the Cost of Content before and after the installation the basic ROI for the deployment begins to be identified.  But Cost of Content is also a component of several other calculations, like Content Valuation.

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If there was ever any doubt that we are funnier as as group than alone - read the user reviews of the $500.00 dedicated link cable on Amazon.  (do it quick before they catch on an pull it)

I’m sure there is some techno-social commentary I could make about crowds and social computing but why waste the time when you could be reading about cables that send and receive ethernet packets from the past.

When Marko posted his report card for the EMC Documentum OEM edition I thought it was a fair assessment of the offering. The fact that EMC has based it on the 5.5 release and not D6 was troubling though. Turns out the post was far more timely than we realized. Now that Adobe has announced they will be incorporating content management services to LiveCycle by embedding Alfresco, the choices EMC and others are making in the OEM space are more critical than ever. (more…)

At EMC World, the OEM edition of Documentum was unveiled, Content Services OEM.  The presentation showed that EMC understands that an OEM program is made up of the platform, support, and marketing.  Unfortunately what they developed for CS didn’t quite meet the standards that they themselves announced.  But there are ways to work around their weaknesses, and it’s the first fully announced OEM ECM platform with access to a good lead engine.

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