Wednesday 20 February 2008

eRoom is dead, long live.......

........ the 'Knowledge Worker Rich Internet Client' - or something like that anyway !

Prompted by Sharepoint postings by Pie (Embracing Sharepoint, Recipe for Death ?) and Big Men on Content ( Warning to CMS Vendors - Sharepoint doesn't need you) - I was chatting with someone this morning, who used to be (well, still is) a serious eRoom expert, who is now a serious Sharepoint expert - who pointed out that at EMC's European Momentum 07 Documentum user conference in Monaco last November, EMC announced that eRoom 8 (the project formerly codenamed 'Phoenix') is 'dead' (if it had been codenamed Parrot, it would have 'shuffled of its mortal coil....').

Now I missed this because I was attending Janus Boye's CMF07 instead, and non of my colleagues who attended Momentum seemed to have passed this gem on ! When I attended EMC World 2007 in Florida in the early summer of last year, the talk was very much of Phoenix / eRoom 8 and its merger of eRoom with Documentum Content Server. In fact they were saying the new web services stack in Content Server basically made eRoom just an MS ASP.Net front end to Content Server.

Now apparently this was decided to be not good enough, and we are going to get an interim eRoom release and wait until 2009 for something 'much better' - the aforementioned 'Rich Internet Client' for knoweldge workers. I have no inside scoop on what this will be or what it looks like, but apparently there is going to be a presentation on this subject at a big D6 marketing event at Wembley Stadium in London the 28th of Feb. Unfortunately I can't attend that either !

So, in response to 'Pie' and the 'Big Men' - perhaps not everyone has rolled over for Microsoft ???

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I too am an eRoom expert having worked with it since '99

It's a great great application, but I too have become immersed in Sharepoint the last 2 years...

and many eRoom customers are in process or are looking at migrating to Sharepoint.

It's unfortunate, but the reality is Sharepoint has caught up and offers a complete solution and vision. It's compelling for customers to switch...and economical if they are already a microsoft shop. I'd like to see more from EMC with regards to a more complete vision of Documentum, eRoom and front office knowledge worker apps and how they envision the future.

Unknown said...

Dear All,

My Name is Tony and We have successfully migrated fom eRoom to Sharepoint recently. Was painful, Initially when we tried to migrate all eRooms on our own. But found a tool and negotiated with the vendor and it was just couple of days for the entire migrations.
We migrated to WSS. If anyone have any questions, please contact me on tmannem@gmail.com