EMC and FatWire partner for Web Experience Management

I picked up on this yesterday via CMS Wire, you can see Barb Moshers article here: "EMC replaces their WCM with FatWires Web Experience Management"

EMC's press release is here: EMC and FatWire Jointly Deliver Marketing Solutions for Web Experience and Brand Management

As we would expect of anything Documentum related, Pie has some cogent thoughts on the partnership on his blog here: "EMC admits it needs help, partners with FatWire". Pie also links to a blog posting be Lee at BMOC in his article.

So what do we think ? Well I have to concur with both Barb and Pie that this is largely a very positive thing. I have only worked with Documentum since 5.25, but back then Web Publisher was very much the red haired step child, starved of love and attention, never mind investment ! At the Open University when we were looking at how we would use Web Publisher, an un-named (for his own protection) consulting friend of ours called it a 'dog' and told us not to use it, even if we had paid for it.

Now to be fair, there have been more recent investment, and in the 6.0 to 6.5 releases Web Publisher has got better, but I still liked the title of Pie's piece - EMC admits it needs help. I know very little about the FatWire product to be honest, but I am aware that it has a good reputation. It certainly could not be anything other than an improvement over Web Publisher in many respects, but as it is also a move up from 'WCM" to 'WEM' it brings many new features such as integrated analytics.

Today EMC and FatWire held a webinar to flesh out a little of the detail in the press release and to show a demo of the FatWire product dragging in content from a Documentum repository, and I got to ask some questions of the panel, most of which were answered by Peggy Ringhausen, Senior Product Manager for WCM at EMC.

First I asked Peggy how far the relationship with FatWire goes with respect to deprecating Web Publisher. Peggy confirmed that the long term view is to move Documentum WCM to FatWire as the 'EMC Documentum Web Experience Management solution'. There is no end of life date for Web Publisher yet, and she noted that it will probably take around 3 years to end of life the old product line.

The current integration between FatWire and the Documentum repository is one way, with the Documentum content being the 'master copy' which can be 'shared' to the FatWire repository. This appeared to be seamless in the demo. Loren Weinberg of FatWire noted in response to a question that metadata is synchronised as well as the content item, and that synchronisation can be automatic (i.e. master content in Documentum is edited, then a copy is automatically moved to FatWire) or it can trigger a workflow so that FatWire content managers can make a decision on which asset to use.

Coming later this year as part of the move to integrate Documentum's Digital Asset Management platform underneath FatWire will be full bi-directional synchronization. This would allow UGC from a FatWire site to be archived in Documentum, or whole web sites to be archived for legal compliance reasons. Loren also called out the joint research efforts to be undertaken as the partnership moves forward.

All in all it was a useful webinar, and at some point the recording should appear on the EMC On-Demand Events page.

Why did EMC just not buy FatWire ? Well there is no need to make such an acquisition even if you can afford it, when a good partnership will suffice and as Pie noted in his article, its a good thing to seperate the content application from the content management platform. FatWire is free to develop and extend its platform at its own rate, with no dependencies on the rate at which EMC can develop the base underlying platform. However I do wonder that if at some point you could use FatWire without the need for the seperate FatWire repository that you need right now?

EMC introduces My Documentum

Some former colleagues from the Open University attended the 'Momentum Europe' conference in Athens last week. I had already spotted this press release but have only now got round to examining the release of the new 'My Documentum' family:

"EMC My Documentum Family Delivers The Power of Enterprise Content Management to Every Business User"

The press release has embedded YouTube videos and links to product information pages.

So, my initial thought was, nothing new here, it's just repackaging existing products under a new marketing banner, but its Documentum Client for Outlook (DCO), File Sharing Services etc

Not so ! Discussing this with my old colleague Mark, who was at the conference and very much knee and elbow deep in the Open University Documentum implementation, he said there is considerable new code, and for example with DCO the integration is much slicker, giving a much more 'native' Outlook experience.

This is interesting in the historical context of a blog based discussion with Shiv Singh of RazorFish about "Outlook as the portal" - its your email client, your personal information manager, your contacts manager, calendar, RSS reader etc etc ...... but also your client for your Documentum ECM repository (and other enteprise systems too ?)

To take that topic down a slightly different path, at an AIIM sponsored seminar on SharePoint 2010 this morning, one screenshot showed Outlook 2010 displaying social information gathered from SharePoint MySite profiles.

Yet, unless I am missing something, or doing something really stupid, with Outlook 2007 and SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) you can not simply drag and drop an email from your inbox into a SharePoint document library. Sure you can connect to a document library, it appears in your left hand navigation pane, and will allow you sync the contents of that document library to take them "off line" and on the road with you - but can't just simply move an email into the library ! Nor can you create a 'shortcut' in the Outlook shortcuts view of the left hand nav bar, to a WebDav (Network Places) view of a document library either.

Hurrah (!) to EMC for continuing the client side development, and lets home SharePoint integration with Outlook and particularly email is better in the next version.

ECM Forum Toronto

Today I spent the day at the Toronto Metro Convention Centre at the EMC Forum. It was a good day, informative, and I finally got to meet and chat with Chuck Hollis after his keynote.

During said keynote, which had a loose theme of 'the future of information management' Chuck mentioned an Economist Intelligence Unit report, sponsored by EMC; "The future of enterprise information governance" which was released today. If you click this link it will take you straight into the report PDF. You can also click here for a video of Chuck discussing the importance of information governance.

I attended an overview session on content management and archiving technologies, to see some of the Documentum 6.5 goodies, including 'My Documentum' and 'CentreStage' - but of course it was an overview, so no great detail, and even worse from my point of view, no demo machines or consultants with laptops in the 'exhibition area' so I did not get to play with CentreStage.

Admittedly this week is the big ARMA show in the U.S. and most of the EMC presence was there.

The second session was a Records Management one, with a focus on the new federated RM capabilities. This was a very intersting session, with some well grounded admissions that federated RM will never produce a 'perfect' solution from many viewpoints, but that some retention management over legacy silo's has got to be better than none at all ! You can check out EMC's Records Manager and Retention Policy Services products here.

As the final CMA track session was about document capture (i.e. scanning) I decided to check out the 'Data Loss Prevention' session. This is about using RSA products to prevent accidental loss of information from within your organisation, its not an "anti-hacking" type of security product, but it was interesting to me, but for what you might consider an odd angle. Microsoft was mentioned as a case study, as they wanted to use the DLP technology to safeguard source code, and it was mentioned that it was used to scan 30,000 file shares and 120,000 Sharepoint sites ! Please note that is note 30K 'folders' but 30K 'shares' with goodness knows how many folders in them......

Even better (?) did you immediately notice that they have 3 times more Sharepoint sites than file shares. Now that is what I call 'unchecked proliferation' :-) I will have to look up how many staff MS have on average, just to see how many Sharepoint sites per worker (or vice versa) that works out to be.

While we are talking about Sharepoint, and in reference to my previous post, the forum was much less of an unadulterated MOSS 'love in' than the last EMC World I attended (last year). The message seems to be much more that of "Sharepoint as the portal on top of our 'real' ECM system". The reasons for this being that the 'real' ECMS is better at playing nicely with Heirarchical Storage Management (HSM), single instance storage, transactional processes, RM and compliance. Possibly the qoute of the day was: "well Sharepoint done will is OK, but Sharepoint done badly is an absolute nightmare..."

Oh yeah, we hear you..!