Enteprise Search - its not just the technology

I had a great chat with Martin White of Intranet Focus today, he rang me from the UK. We worked together on various elements of the intranet and search projects that were under my pervue at the Open University.

He debriefed me on the Enterprise Search Summit 2008 in New York, for which Martin gave the keynote. He later sent me his slides so I could have a read myself. Now Martin's knowledge on search is encylopedic, and we have had many chats on various elements of the subject and it turned out that we had similar opinions about search and ECM, i.e. that sorting out search problems or enteprise content management problems are as much about planning, governance and building teams of people to 'manage' the technology - bottom line, as per usual its all about people and not the shiny new software.

Martin puts emphasis in his presentation slides about building a team to manage your search, when I was presenting on the OU ECM programme I would always be sure to emphasise the size and breadth of the multi-disciplinary team brought together to implement the strategy. Martin has posted a summary of the conference and some of his thoughts here.

Now this also fits with Prescient Digital Media's advice on implementing or improving intranets, that there should be an emphasis on planning, governance and 'managing'. Indeed to push the theme even further Toby recently posted on the Intranetblog on the Pro's and Con's of Sharepoint, qouting Shawn Shell, the author of the new CMS Watch Sharepoint report. Shawn's advise on how to ensure success in deploying Sharepoint also focuses on what might be called 'soft' aspects of information systems project management.

OK, so non of this is 'rocket science' to me, Martin, Toby or Shawn, but if your a newly promoted IT guy (hey, I've been there !) who's been told to implement Sharepoint, or buy a new search engine, the change management, people management and information management (metadata, taxonomies, classification schema's, 'findability' etc) aspects might be a long way from the top of your task list ! When it comes down to it they may not be at the forefront of the CIO's thoughts either.......

Having been involved around the periphery of a big CRM programme, and having watched colleagues do data warehousing and BI etc, non of this is specific to 'unstructured data' - but, time for the blatant plug (!) if your doing ECM, Intranet, CMS or search projects, Prescient can help to ensure you have the right executive backing, the right governance structures and the right team in place to implement your projects.

EMC World post conference follow up

Word of Pie has a nice post as post conference follow up on the many posts he made from the conference and indeed he lists other bloggers who are tackling the same subjects, I wont repeat the lists here, just go read Laurences posting'

Main point from me, fingers crossed that Magellan is as good as the demo's suggest it might be !

A new life for Liferay ...

a new life a corporate suite that is, well perhaps. Janus from CMS Watch writes about the new partnership between Sun and Liferay here: Sun Portal Server rides into the sunset in favour of Liferay.

My boss Toby chips in with some analysis on the Intranetblog with: Another Portal bites the dust.

However I would like to comment on a different angle. I have met the Liferay guys at a conference. They are one of those great open source stories, they started development of their product to meet their own needs (a new portal type website for their church if I remember correctly). The software has gone from strength to strength based on the original developers and the community they have built up around the product. However they also have some commercial nous, just look how well they have done so far ! So, to get any bigger, or to push into more markets the serious cash backing that Sun can provide will do no harm at all ! Of course Liferay is seriously platform agnostic, but it does run on Suns Java app server and of course it runs with MySQL, lets hope if the relationship is cemented and Sun fully acquires Liferay (which has been hinted at as noted by Toby) that Sun remembers to play nicely with respect to running Liferay on other platforms.

By the way, although I have no experience of running Liferay, it appears that the new collaboration features in version 5 make it a Java based competitor to MS MOSS 2007 - and competition is always good ;-)

The Magellan presentation and info - updated x 2

I am not going to repeat his post, or attempt analysis yet, but go read Laurences posting to get a nice overview of the Collaboration session and details of what to expect from ECM's Magellan:

Introduction to EMC’s Next-Generation Knowledge Worker Client

Thanks to Laurence for his diligent blogging :-)

Update #1:

Also James at ChiefTech dives in with a small posting: EMC's Documentum and eRoom gets a 2.0 make over with "Magellan"

Big Men On Content: EMC Documentum Will Not Go Quietly Into that Dark Night

Channel Web: EMC Unveils Content Management, Collaboration Services Roadmap

And of course, as this is the new '2.0' aware EMC, keynote video's are already up on YouTube :-)

Update #2

Whitney's demo of Knowledge worker stuff is in the Mark Lewis keynote starting at part 5 and Magellan or 'Essentials' is in part 6 , and the 'rich media' / digital asset management client in part 7 - the video is not great so you don't get a really good view of the interfaces

Oh to be in Vegas....

And not just because the weather is unseasonably chilly here in Toronto, but to be at EMC World of course !

I envy Laurence, Alexander (who I met at last years conference) the Big Men On Content (who I would love to meet and chat to) and Alan (from CMS Watch) and all the others blogging from the conference, because its always interesting to get the inside track on where things are going.

Of great interest to me, and I am awaiting additional blog postings and post-conference email on the subject, is Magellan the new 'Knowledge Worker' client, or if you like, the replacement for eRoom. So the more we get to know about this the better, for example its integration with the Content Server repository at one end of the spectrum, and with 'social networking' type tools at the other. Well hopefully we may all know more soon !

Email Archiving and Management report from CMS Watch

OK, this is a must read report if your interested in managing email chaos ! I know, because I have read it already..... :-)

This is another exemplary piece of CMS Watch analysis, not just disecting some of the technology / products available in this space, but concentrating on what you need to know about archiving and managing email messaging, and most importantly, focusing on the possible fit between one of the available solutions and your own specific business requirements.

In my opinion this would be a good read for the 'C' level individual who does not need read the indepth analysis of each product, but does need some hand holding at the high level - the 'EAM' for dummies section, whilst at the same time, if your an experienced Exchange or Notes admin, there is still a lot here for you to get your teeth into.

Of course from a wider ECM / Information Management perspective, you might need to come at EAM from a records management or compliance angle too.

Lets face, when it comes down to it, most organisations are a long way from ECMS based content centric collaboration, full use of Instant Messaging or 'conversational media' such as blogs, email is the lowest common denominator and like all forms of digital content creation (across all media) the volumes just continue to grow and grow !

First day at Prescient Digital Media !

So, been Canadian for just over a couple of weeks now, had my first 'public holiday' - Victoria Day - yesterday, but today I started in the new job. Not a lot I can tell you about that yet, I mean I have only been in the office half the day .......

However as well as getting on with creating a full consulting offering around improving your intranet search experience, I have been asked do some research on MOSS 07 / Sharepoint, as so many of our clients are considering for one use or another.

My new boss, Toby, has obviously been discussing MOSS with people at the Enterprise 3 conference down in San Diego, as he made this posting on the Intranet Blog yesterday: Sharepoint requires proper architecture and governance (well 'duh' but obviously many people are neglecting this !)

So, more Sharepoint posts to come......

Yahoo, sport and other stuff

So, after a few days of of being 'dark' or off the net, I am using my sisters computer from her home in Manchester to catch up on email and blogs etc.

It was quite interesting to read sunday papers coverage of the Yahoo - Microsoft spat. In many ways I am glad Yahoo rebuffed the unsolicited approach. In other ways, I wish they had succeeded, because personally I think swallowing FAST and then Yahoo would have just caused internal chaos at Redmond !

Last day at the OU was quite emotional, lots of people, lots of nice words and some lovely presents. I have just spent the weekend with my parents and saying goodbye to them was also quite emotional, but when you consider my 4 year old son is quite happy with the concept of 'Skyping' someone for a video call, and perhaps mores to the point, so is my 75 year old father, then it just shows how technology truly shrinks the world and makes communications simpler for emmigre's :-)

For Alan Pelz-sharpe if your reading - I got to watch Rovers versus Hull FC on Sky with my dad and brother-in-law and a few beers - not the best game ever, but a win for Rovers in the local derby is a win for Rovers, full stop !

So, time to drop off the net again for a while, until we get established in Toronto ! TTFN.....