I just finished up a little side project creating a custom Documentum UI with the Eclipse based FlexBuilder 3.0. I rarely code any more and this was my first opportunity to work with the technology. When learning new languages and techniques I find that I spend far less time these days with syntax than I do with the idiosyncrasies of the IDE’s.

I started this project immediately after test driving D6 Composer which is also Eclipse based. I was dreading it. My team’s experience with Composer was frustrating on many levels. After two days with FlexBuilder though I have to confess, I loved it. Flex Builder 3 was great! Despite radical differences in scope and purpose, I was surprised at how different my impressions were of the tools given that they are fundamentally the same IDE. (more…)

I was one of about 30 people to be fortunate enough to attend one of the more interesting sessions at EMC World for Documentum.  Interesting in that it was all about implementing Web 2.0 solutions on top of the platform.  Fortunate enough in that, for some reason, the session was scheduled for the last session of the last day.  This meant for east coasters like me taking a red-eye home after losing more money at the tables.  

“Taking Advantage of Social Computing with Documentum” presented EMC’s architecture in a light that would use it’s libraries for that would allow vendors to develop WIKIs, BLOGs and 360 networks that take advantage of the platform.   (more…)

EMC World was exhausting but very productive and a good time was had by everyone I spoke to. By all accounts from the many postings I’ve read this has been far more informative and newsworthy than in recent years for CMA. (more…)

The biggest surprise of EMC World so far was presented in the Tuesday keynote but for some reason the buzz wasn’t going around.  I was asked last night if I had seen the Magellan demo but as I had only arrive that afternoon I had missed it.  I also didn’t know that the keynotes were being published on YouTube.  Had the question come from anyone else I would have thought “ho hum”, but when this gentleman makes an enthusiastic statement you pay attention.  So I had my quest for Wednesday.  What I found brought me back to Documentum circa 1999.   

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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…)

Chuck Hollis scares me. If you aren’t a regular reader of his blog you’re missing out. He has a deceptively disarming way of painting the picture of technoloy’s future that makes you feel better about the coming apocalypse. Chuck just put out a series of great posts on The Changing Face of Information.  He posts often on VMWare and virtualization in general and for the series he included this post where he argues that virtualization reduces friction in IT delivery.  It makes me wonder, with no friction - how do you hold on to it. Or better - how do you hold on to IT. (more…)

EMC has been gobbling up companies like there is no tomorrow. On Monday they sweetened the offer to acquire Iomega and this one introduces something new to EMC. With the possible exception of hosted backup and storage services from Dantz and Mozy, EMC has stayed away from marketing it’s wares directly to the home user. If they pull this one off, EMC for the first time will have real estate outside of the data center and in your home office or laptop case.

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Two years ago Gartner coined a new acronym CEVA, Content Enabled Vertical Applications, and it created some buzz in the enterprise content management space. Now I get a little lost here and have to think about what a Vertical means in software terms. Imagitek, a proclaimed CEVA, offers case management with specializations in contracts and legal documents. So to me this is a horizontal application with vertical customizations. So isn’t Open Text’s LegalKEY Solutions closer to a real CEVA? Rather than getting stuck on the definition let’s redefine CEVA as Content Enabled Value Application.

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