Today was my last day as "Knowledge Manager" for a global division of a major professional services network. On Monday I start a new role as Senior Strategy Consultant (Enterprise Content Management) for one of North Americas biggest banks.
So unless they have a social media policy that says I can't blog, which I somehow doubt, as I am going "back to my roots" in ECM, I should actually have more to blog about !
Wish me luck .......
Showing posts with label ECM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ECM. Show all posts
Friday, 6 May 2011
Tuesday, 12 April 2011
JBoye Philadelphia 3rd to 5th of May - sign up now !
If you have not yet signed up for the JBoye 2011 conference in Philadelphia next month, do so now !
Why do I so fervently suggest you do such a thing ? Simply because Janus and his crew throw an absolutely superb practitioner focused event. You cannot possibly attend without learning something useful and connecting with fellow professionals.
So head directly over to the site immediate to check out the program so you can justify to the budget holders and get signed up now: http://jboye.com/conferences/philadelphia11/
Unfortunately I will not be attending, as my employer let me go to AIIM in D.C. last month (even then only because it is my "professional body" and I was a speaker !), but believe me, if you only attend one industry conference this year, then JBoye 2011 should be it.
The conference program is expanded into 8 tracks this year, so there is bound to be something useful and interesting to you: http://jboye.com/conferences/philadelphia11/program/
Even better, some of the speakers are doing promo videos !
So, once again I really cannot recommend this event enough, no vendor hard sell, just learning from your peers.
This excellent video of testimonials was taken at the inaugural JBoye 2009 conference by my good friend Line Berg (@superline)
Why do I so fervently suggest you do such a thing ? Simply because Janus and his crew throw an absolutely superb practitioner focused event. You cannot possibly attend without learning something useful and connecting with fellow professionals.
So head directly over to the site immediate to check out the program so you can justify to the budget holders and get signed up now: http://jboye.com/conferences/philadelphia11/
Unfortunately I will not be attending, as my employer let me go to AIIM in D.C. last month (even then only because it is my "professional body" and I was a speaker !), but believe me, if you only attend one industry conference this year, then JBoye 2011 should be it.
The conference program is expanded into 8 tracks this year, so there is bound to be something useful and interesting to you: http://jboye.com/conferences/philadelphia11/program/
Even better, some of the speakers are doing promo videos !
So, once again I really cannot recommend this event enough, no vendor hard sell, just learning from your peers.
This excellent video of testimonials was taken at the inaugural JBoye 2009 conference by my good friend Line Berg (@superline)
Tuesday, 29 March 2011
Info360 Presentation Slides: "No ECM - No KM !"
My presentation at the AIIM Info360 conference in Washington D.C. last week was based on a very simple premise: in order to achieve a Knowledge Management enabled organisation (or 'to do KM') you need a solid foundation of good information management, and for unstructured information that means having an ECM strategy.
I have removed my employers corporate branding and added a few explanatory slides, as I did not have time to add a voice over (plus then you get added value by attending the conference !).
All feedback is appreciated.
I have removed my employers corporate branding and added a few explanatory slides, as I did not have time to add a voice over (plus then you get added value by attending the conference !).
All feedback is appreciated.
Sunday, 27 March 2011
AIIM Info360 - Post conference summary
Firstly a huge thank you to Jennifer Marcus and her team at Questex Media Group for the organization of this years AIIM Info360 conference - the last one ever to have the dual AIIM Expo / Info360 branding.
Secondly another huge thank you to all the speakers who made my attendance so useful and interesting, whether they were end users, or members of the vendor community, the presentations (at least the ones I attended) were of a very high standard.
The real highlight for me though, was getting together with ECM experts with whom my discourse is normally of the 'virtual' variety; to chat about ECM related subjects with my friends from the Real Story Group, to meet up with my old mate's Laurence Hart (@piewords) and Cheryl McKinnon (@CherylMcKinnon) and to meet Lee Dallas (@ldallasBMOC) of Big Men On Content "in the flesh" (although Lee is not that big anymore, and I may soon qualify to replace him......).
Anyway, before we get to more links to interesting people, I will give you my major takeaways:
1. The Cloud is not mature enough for ECM
2. SharePoint might be entering the "trough of disillusionment"
3. I am truly sick and tired of the "social" buzzword - especially when used in the same sentence as "collaboration"
4. Mobile is only going to become more important, but actually "mobile ECM" or rather mobile access to information is not synonymous with the Cloud
5. BI plus ECM is not a new concept, but content analytics may play a more important role in measuring the benefits of an ECM strategy in the future
Before we go any further, let me point you to the slideshare.net URL where you can find John Mancini's (President of AIIM: @jmancini77 ) keynote presentation:
http://www.slideshare.net/jmancini77/info360-keynote-by-aiim-president-john-mancini
It was a good presentation (as ever, John never disappoints) however I for one remain pretty much unconvinced by the 'Systems of Record' and 'Systems of Engagement' that has been a theme for AIIM recently. Cheryl notes in her first write up of the conference, that she is now more convinced having heard John speak. I did not realize that like me, she was not a big fan of the original white paper, if I had known we could have discussed it over our beer on Wednesday night !
Speaking of Cheryl and John's presentation, thanks Cheryl for tweeting from the audience of my session. I want to take the corporate branding off my slides before I upload them to slideshare, but I will try to get them uploaded this week. By the way my whole session can be summed up in one very simple premise:
Whatever your definition of Knowledge Management, I would content that KM requires good Enterprise Information Management, and good EIM means that for unstructured information you should have a good Enterprise Content Management Strategy ! Simple really.........
So back to a short paragraph on each of my main take away's as noted above:
1. The Cloud is not mature enough for ECM; I took part in the Real Story Group's "Stump the Consultant" session as a member of the panel and one of the questions from the audience was along the lines of "how do I enforce my Records Management retention schedule in the cloud" and non of the panel could come up with a really good answer. Laurence (Pie) also did an excellent session on the future of ECM, where we heard about his idea for "Omnipresent Content Management" (OCM); I suggest you search for the term on his blog. The interesting thing is that while the cloud is necessary for a fully realized OCM, it was suggested that this does not rely on ECM type technologies (i.e. Library Services type functionality) but rather on the a solid foundation of federated identity management, which currently simply does not exist.
2. SharePoint might be entering the "trough of disillusionment". Now I have worked with SharePoint day in and day out for the last two years (MOSS2007 - not SP2010) and while I am not a Microsoft 'hater' per se, I am very aware of the weaknesses of the platform. It appears that others are become less easily swayed by MS rather slick marketing too. No one can say the product is not a huge success, but similarly it is not a huge success in every deployment. Yes there was a thriving MS partner ecosystem section down on the Expo floor, but that is kind of the point: SharePoint is a "platform" with which you can pretty much do anything you want, as long as you have the time and the cash. You may spend the cash on developers, or on buying 3rd party add on products from that thriving ecosystem of partners. However it would appear that people are starting to understand that for some requirements an alternative such as EMC, IBM or OpenText might actually be less complex to implement, and may not be any more expensive (even if not massively cheaper).
3. Social as a buzzword: More on this is a separate posting will be the best way to deal with it I think, but on more than one occasion I was ready to explode. I will just say that I find the term "social collaboration" to be the most annoying of all - if someone can explain to me how collaboration by definition can ever be a NON-social activity, then I will wind my neck in (as they say in the RN).........
4. Mobile does not equal cloud: Some vendors seem to using the requirement for mobile access to information as an 'excuse' for hosting / holding that information in the cloud. It is patently obvious that mobile access to information does not require it be kept in some sort of SaaS / Cloud service. We have been accessing information, through the corporate firewall, on mobile devices for years. Yes, I believe mobile will be increasingly important (although not universally), but there are more strategy and policy questions to be overcome than technical ones (apps versus web, 1 device or many, formatting versus prioritizing content etc).
5. Content Analytics (as Alan Pelz-Sharpe called it: The shotgun wedding of BI and ECM !). Not sexy, not necessarily easy, but BI style dashboards providing 'management information system' (remember when MIS was trendy ?) type access across our content stores will be come more important as information management in general matures. BI focuses on structured information systems, the data warehouses with their billions of well structured rows and columns, but don't forget, most of the metadata that makes our content management systems function properly sits in the rows and columns of an RDBMS - so why not run your BI software against that ???
More shout outs and thank you's
Some auspicious ECM blogging company at EMC party on Tuesday night; From left to right:
Thanks to Michelle Huff of Oracle for getting back to me really quickly so that I can put some of her colleagues in touch with Micheal Sampson (@collabguy) ref Oracle Beehive.
Thanks to Patricia Eng of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for keeping me informed on what was going on in Japan while we were in Washington - now I know a real Nuclear Engineer !
Small world Syndrome story - I had to go to D.C. to meet Arlene Spence ( EverythingECM ) who actually lives just down the road from me in Mississauga !
Thanks to Laurence for driving me from downtown D.C. to my hotel in Arlington - Twice !!
Big shout out to all the guys from the Real Story Group; Tony Byrne, Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Jarod Gingras and of course, Irina Guseva.
A final observation, just as you should not feed a Mogwai after midnight, nor ever get one wet, you should really never upset an ethnically Russian, U.S. citizen who is a expert industry analyst after 8pm - it just won't work out well for you.........
Secondly another huge thank you to all the speakers who made my attendance so useful and interesting, whether they were end users, or members of the vendor community, the presentations (at least the ones I attended) were of a very high standard.
Gratuitous photo of a D.C. landmark.........
Anyway, before we get to more links to interesting people, I will give you my major takeaways:
1. The Cloud is not mature enough for ECM
2. SharePoint might be entering the "trough of disillusionment"
3. I am truly sick and tired of the "social" buzzword - especially when used in the same sentence as "collaboration"
4. Mobile is only going to become more important, but actually "mobile ECM" or rather mobile access to information is not synonymous with the Cloud
5. BI plus ECM is not a new concept, but content analytics may play a more important role in measuring the benefits of an ECM strategy in the future
Before we go any further, let me point you to the slideshare.net URL where you can find John Mancini's (President of AIIM: @jmancini77 ) keynote presentation:
http://www.slideshare.net/jmancini77/info360-keynote-by-aiim-president-john-mancini
It was a good presentation (as ever, John never disappoints) however I for one remain pretty much unconvinced by the 'Systems of Record' and 'Systems of Engagement' that has been a theme for AIIM recently. Cheryl notes in her first write up of the conference, that she is now more convinced having heard John speak. I did not realize that like me, she was not a big fan of the original white paper, if I had known we could have discussed it over our beer on Wednesday night !
Speaking of Cheryl and John's presentation, thanks Cheryl for tweeting from the audience of my session. I want to take the corporate branding off my slides before I upload them to slideshare, but I will try to get them uploaded this week. By the way my whole session can be summed up in one very simple premise:
Whatever your definition of Knowledge Management, I would content that KM requires good Enterprise Information Management, and good EIM means that for unstructured information you should have a good Enterprise Content Management Strategy ! Simple really.........
So back to a short paragraph on each of my main take away's as noted above:
1. The Cloud is not mature enough for ECM; I took part in the Real Story Group's "Stump the Consultant" session as a member of the panel and one of the questions from the audience was along the lines of "how do I enforce my Records Management retention schedule in the cloud" and non of the panel could come up with a really good answer. Laurence (Pie) also did an excellent session on the future of ECM, where we heard about his idea for "Omnipresent Content Management" (OCM); I suggest you search for the term on his blog. The interesting thing is that while the cloud is necessary for a fully realized OCM, it was suggested that this does not rely on ECM type technologies (i.e. Library Services type functionality) but rather on the a solid foundation of federated identity management, which currently simply does not exist.
2. SharePoint might be entering the "trough of disillusionment". Now I have worked with SharePoint day in and day out for the last two years (MOSS2007 - not SP2010) and while I am not a Microsoft 'hater' per se, I am very aware of the weaknesses of the platform. It appears that others are become less easily swayed by MS rather slick marketing too. No one can say the product is not a huge success, but similarly it is not a huge success in every deployment. Yes there was a thriving MS partner ecosystem section down on the Expo floor, but that is kind of the point: SharePoint is a "platform" with which you can pretty much do anything you want, as long as you have the time and the cash. You may spend the cash on developers, or on buying 3rd party add on products from that thriving ecosystem of partners. However it would appear that people are starting to understand that for some requirements an alternative such as EMC, IBM or OpenText might actually be less complex to implement, and may not be any more expensive (even if not massively cheaper).
3. Social as a buzzword: More on this is a separate posting will be the best way to deal with it I think, but on more than one occasion I was ready to explode. I will just say that I find the term "social collaboration" to be the most annoying of all - if someone can explain to me how collaboration by definition can ever be a NON-social activity, then I will wind my neck in (as they say in the RN).........
4. Mobile does not equal cloud: Some vendors seem to using the requirement for mobile access to information as an 'excuse' for hosting / holding that information in the cloud. It is patently obvious that mobile access to information does not require it be kept in some sort of SaaS / Cloud service. We have been accessing information, through the corporate firewall, on mobile devices for years. Yes, I believe mobile will be increasingly important (although not universally), but there are more strategy and policy questions to be overcome than technical ones (apps versus web, 1 device or many, formatting versus prioritizing content etc).
5. Content Analytics (as Alan Pelz-Sharpe called it: The shotgun wedding of BI and ECM !). Not sexy, not necessarily easy, but BI style dashboards providing 'management information system' (remember when MIS was trendy ?) type access across our content stores will be come more important as information management in general matures. BI focuses on structured information systems, the data warehouses with their billions of well structured rows and columns, but don't forget, most of the metadata that makes our content management systems function properly sits in the rows and columns of an RDBMS - so why not run your BI software against that ???
More shout outs and thank you's
Some auspicious ECM blogging company at EMC party on Tuesday night; From left to right:
- Lee Dallas (@ldallasBMOC)
- Johnny Gee (@ecmguru)
- Laurence 'Pie' Hart (@piewords)
- Yours truly (@jedpc)
Thanks to Michelle Huff of Oracle for getting back to me really quickly so that I can put some of her colleagues in touch with Micheal Sampson (@collabguy) ref Oracle Beehive.
Thanks to Patricia Eng of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for keeping me informed on what was going on in Japan while we were in Washington - now I know a real Nuclear Engineer !
Small world Syndrome story - I had to go to D.C. to meet Arlene Spence ( EverythingECM ) who actually lives just down the road from me in Mississauga !
Thanks to Laurence for driving me from downtown D.C. to my hotel in Arlington - Twice !!
Big shout out to all the guys from the Real Story Group; Tony Byrne, Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Jarod Gingras and of course, Irina Guseva.
A final observation, just as you should not feed a Mogwai after midnight, nor ever get one wet, you should really never upset an ethnically Russian, U.S. citizen who is a expert industry analyst after 8pm - it just won't work out well for you.........
Monday, 14 March 2011
AIIM Info360 Conference and Expo 2011 - discount code !
The AIIM Info360 Conference and Expo, in Washington D.C. is almost upon us, the pre-conference learning sessions day is next Monday (March 21st) !
I am presenting a session entitled: "Where ECM fits in your KM and Info Mngt. Strategies" at 1pm on the Tuesday afternoon (March 22nd).
If you have not signed up yet (why not ?) then your in luck because I can provide you with a $100 discount on a either a Gold or Silver conference pass: use the discount code 834 and go to the registration page to register using this code.
You can download the full conference program PDF at this link:
http://images.questex.com/
So, I will see you all in D.C. then ?
I am presenting a session entitled: "Where ECM fits in your KM and Info Mngt. Strategies" at 1pm on the Tuesday afternoon (March 22nd).
If you have not signed up yet (why not ?) then your in luck because I can provide you with a $100 discount on a either a Gold or Silver conference pass: use the discount code 834 and go to the registration page to register using this code.
You can download the full conference program PDF at this link:
http://images.questex.com/
So, I will see you all in D.C. then ?
Monday, 31 January 2011
Search Based Applications and Concept Search
I have not written about search for a while, as my current role is is less involved in search than my previous one, but then a couple of things come along at the same time.
Last week my colleague Martin White, of Intranet Focus, who is a true enterprise search guru, wrote about Search-based Applications. Martin's post was prompted by his review of a new book on Search-based Applications (SBA), but he also briefly mentions some of the latest and greatest in search technology trends, and I am sure he will not mind me quoting him verbatim to get the point across:
"For example, coming to a desktop near you before too long will be search tools based on topic modelling, which use Bayesian statistics and machine learning to infer the relationship between topics in a document. What is fascinating about this technique is that it dates back to the development of latent semantic indexing in the late 1980s, which was then refined into probabilistic latent semantic indexing a decade later. Now the buzz is about Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), which itself has formed the basis for correlated topic models (CTM) and dynamic topic modelling (DTM)."
Not that most of us ever thought otherwise, but this is a timely reminder perhaps, that there is more to intranet and enterprise search than the technology built into SharePoint !
It is therefore very timely after Martin's post that another element of search is brought to my attention. Today Clearwell Systems announced that they have extended their "transparent" search capabilities to concept search - to give us Transparent Concept Search.
If your not totally clued up on the idea of concept search (how could you not be ?) this is the intro paragraph of the Wikipedia entry as way of brief explanation:
"A concept search (or conceptual search) is an automated information retrieval method that is used to search electronically stored unstructured text (for example, digital archives, email, scientific literature, etc.) for information that is conceptually similar to the information provided in a search query. In other words, the ideas expressed in the information retrieved in response to a concept search query are relevant to the ideas contained in the text of the query."
The emphasis on ideas is mine. Concept Search is obviously applicable to the general ECM landscape (although Clearwell's focus is on e-Discovery). Now I used to be one of the cynics who thought that just slapping (a good) search engine on top of your content was a recipe for disaster. I was (and mostly still am) of the opinion that metadata and information architecture are massively important, BUT could we finally be getting to a place where search engine performance meets the vendor rhetoric ?
Content Intelligence is a term that has been banded about since at least 2007, if not earlier. The idea is that you can use Business Intelligence concepts and technologies to anlayze your corpus of unstructured information. Will concept search, LDA, CTM and DTM and the rest of the advanced search acronym soup make easy, reliable and therefore highly usable content intelligence available to us all ?
Will real advances in search, added to the application of Moore's law to processing and the availability of 'cheap' storage into the Petabytes and beyond, mean that Information Management and Content Management professionals will finally be able to stop worrying about business classification scheme's, folder structures and metadata and just "throw a search engine on it" ???
Thursday, 16 December 2010
Google ChromeOS, ECM and intranets - UPDATE
Update: I write this, go for lunch, come back and pull this out of my RSS reader: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/12/nothing-but-web.html
----------------------------------------------------------------------
So there has been a little written in the last week or so about Google's ChromeOS - a lot of it complete drivel in my opinion, and as this is my blog, I think I am entitled to expose my opinions.
I am not going to point to lots of articles or podcasts discussing ChromeOS - you can Google it :-)
I would however characterise a lot of the discussions I have read as being heavily US centric, and very consumer oriented. Well I live in North America and Google is a U.S. company, and the CR48 notebooks are only available in the U.S. (as far as I know), so one would expect the coverage to be U.S. centric. This leads to a few problems though. A lot of the 'critique' of ChromeOS that I have read seems to be written by really rabid Microsoft fan boys. They concentrate on how the world is not ready for an always on, cloud enabled, light weight (in all senses of the term) computing paradigm. They wail about Google taking over their lives and dashing their privacy against the rocks of its always analysing servers....... Get real people !
I bet most of these idiots have Facebook accounts, and I would be way more worried about privacy where it comes to that company. They moan about the single employee who abused his system privileges - he was caught and fired ! I could go on, but lets just remind all those numbskulls which company is actually a convicted monopolist in the U.S.........
ChromeOS for consumers
Perhaps more to the point for a European living in North America is the dichotomy of the existence of the centre of gravity for the worlds IT industry (silicon valley) in a totally backwards market for connectivity. For historical (or maybe hysterical) reasons, the U.S. and Canadian telecoms industry just gouges consumers at every chance it gets - and gets away with it. Whether thats cable TV, home internet, or cell phones, you pay a lot more for a lot crappier service over here than you do in Europe, and although I accept all the arguments about bigger land areas and less dense populations - these excuses are getting tired now.
Bringing it back to ChromeOS, it's detractors complain about the lack of ubiquitous, cheap mobile data connectivity - well my point being that is not Google's fault, and I can see the CR48 or other devices doing just fine for consumers in Europe, if not over here. In fact I know that as long as there is going to be Skype client available, and some Linux based equivalent of iTunes to manage his music, my 76 year father would be way better off with a simple ChromeOS device than his Windows Vista machine.
The corporate angle
However I, and a few others apparently, think that the real market for ChromeOS machines is the corporate world. ChromeOS is, at its base just a simplified desktop variant of Linux. It has been developed to run a browser in a highly secure sandboxed environment. How is this starting to sound to any of you who manage thousands of enterprise Windows machines ?
Yes, yes, I know, the whole concept is as old a Babage himself (well maybe not that old) but mainframe terminals evolved into 'thin clients' and then Larry Elison's "Network Computer", and perhaps now, as cloud computing becomes mature, the time is right for a "thin client" in the shape of a ChromeOS machine. There will be packaged apps for ChromeOS, i.e. those that will run off line - but (finally !) lets examine the ECM and intranets aspect of things.
Just about everything I need to do for my work, I do through a web browser. OK, yes I use local MS Office tools, including InfoPath, and Visio - but I have a semi-technical role, otherwise I live in SharePoint sites and other online tools and services available via our global intranet. How many "knowledge workers" could live with Office 365 (the fully cloud version of Office) and do just fine ? Don't want to go to a fully "outside the firewall" cloud model, how about Office 2010 "online" version served up via your SharePoint 2010 installation.
Internal or external clouds?
All the ECM products worth a dime have web interfaces. So do the ERP suites and many (if not most) other classes of major applications. I am not impressed by the arguments that users who are used to PC's want to be able to set their wallpaper and listen to their music - ever heard of Last.fm ? Also are we not constantly informed that Millennial's will not come and work for us if they can't have Facebook and Twitter access? So have we not already passed the boundary from "my desktop" to "my web access" within the workplace ??
So you don't have to buy into the full Gmail, Google Docs, Google Apps world view to make the most of your ChromeOS machine, but if your an SMB / SME why not ?
Perhaps you could go the whole hog and ditch your Intranet 1.0 efforts and go offsite / cloud with a hosted intranet solution from the likes of Sosius or Vialects Noodle (good products IMHO).
So I can see the ChromeOS having a much bigger impact on the corporate world than the consumer one. This might require the CMS companies to put effort into HTML 5 and to speed up the release cycle for the next revamp of their interfaces.
However if Google want ChromeOS thin clients to break into them into the enterprise, they need to put in a lot more effort. Their (lack) of support to Enterprise Apps customers is almost legendary. As I have noted before I would really like to see them create "computing appliances" for companies to put into their data centres to build their private cloud infrastructures - GMail boxes, Google Apps boxes and Google Voice boxes to sit in the rack next to the Google Search Appliances. What this would need though is a full support organisation, with the correct corporate mindset - mind you even if they just pushed their full cloud based services through the corporate firewall they would still need this. So perhaps they should get out their wallets and buy an enterprise consulting firm ?
In summary - Google ChromeOS - it's all about the enterprise stupid !
----------------------------------------------------------------------
So there has been a little written in the last week or so about Google's ChromeOS - a lot of it complete drivel in my opinion, and as this is my blog, I think I am entitled to expose my opinions.
I am not going to point to lots of articles or podcasts discussing ChromeOS - you can Google it :-)
I would however characterise a lot of the discussions I have read as being heavily US centric, and very consumer oriented. Well I live in North America and Google is a U.S. company, and the CR48 notebooks are only available in the U.S. (as far as I know), so one would expect the coverage to be U.S. centric. This leads to a few problems though. A lot of the 'critique' of ChromeOS that I have read seems to be written by really rabid Microsoft fan boys. They concentrate on how the world is not ready for an always on, cloud enabled, light weight (in all senses of the term) computing paradigm. They wail about Google taking over their lives and dashing their privacy against the rocks of its always analysing servers....... Get real people !
I bet most of these idiots have Facebook accounts, and I would be way more worried about privacy where it comes to that company. They moan about the single employee who abused his system privileges - he was caught and fired ! I could go on, but lets just remind all those numbskulls which company is actually a convicted monopolist in the U.S.........
ChromeOS for consumers
Perhaps more to the point for a European living in North America is the dichotomy of the existence of the centre of gravity for the worlds IT industry (silicon valley) in a totally backwards market for connectivity. For historical (or maybe hysterical) reasons, the U.S. and Canadian telecoms industry just gouges consumers at every chance it gets - and gets away with it. Whether thats cable TV, home internet, or cell phones, you pay a lot more for a lot crappier service over here than you do in Europe, and although I accept all the arguments about bigger land areas and less dense populations - these excuses are getting tired now.
Bringing it back to ChromeOS, it's detractors complain about the lack of ubiquitous, cheap mobile data connectivity - well my point being that is not Google's fault, and I can see the CR48 or other devices doing just fine for consumers in Europe, if not over here. In fact I know that as long as there is going to be Skype client available, and some Linux based equivalent of iTunes to manage his music, my 76 year father would be way better off with a simple ChromeOS device than his Windows Vista machine.
The corporate angle
However I, and a few others apparently, think that the real market for ChromeOS machines is the corporate world. ChromeOS is, at its base just a simplified desktop variant of Linux. It has been developed to run a browser in a highly secure sandboxed environment. How is this starting to sound to any of you who manage thousands of enterprise Windows machines ?
Yes, yes, I know, the whole concept is as old a Babage himself (well maybe not that old) but mainframe terminals evolved into 'thin clients' and then Larry Elison's "Network Computer", and perhaps now, as cloud computing becomes mature, the time is right for a "thin client" in the shape of a ChromeOS machine. There will be packaged apps for ChromeOS, i.e. those that will run off line - but (finally !) lets examine the ECM and intranets aspect of things.
Just about everything I need to do for my work, I do through a web browser. OK, yes I use local MS Office tools, including InfoPath, and Visio - but I have a semi-technical role, otherwise I live in SharePoint sites and other online tools and services available via our global intranet. How many "knowledge workers" could live with Office 365 (the fully cloud version of Office) and do just fine ? Don't want to go to a fully "outside the firewall" cloud model, how about Office 2010 "online" version served up via your SharePoint 2010 installation.
Internal or external clouds?
All the ECM products worth a dime have web interfaces. So do the ERP suites and many (if not most) other classes of major applications. I am not impressed by the arguments that users who are used to PC's want to be able to set their wallpaper and listen to their music - ever heard of Last.fm ? Also are we not constantly informed that Millennial's will not come and work for us if they can't have Facebook and Twitter access? So have we not already passed the boundary from "my desktop" to "my web access" within the workplace ??
So you don't have to buy into the full Gmail, Google Docs, Google Apps world view to make the most of your ChromeOS machine, but if your an SMB / SME why not ?
Perhaps you could go the whole hog and ditch your Intranet 1.0 efforts and go offsite / cloud with a hosted intranet solution from the likes of Sosius or Vialects Noodle (good products IMHO).
So I can see the ChromeOS having a much bigger impact on the corporate world than the consumer one. This might require the CMS companies to put effort into HTML 5 and to speed up the release cycle for the next revamp of their interfaces.
However if Google want ChromeOS thin clients to break into them into the enterprise, they need to put in a lot more effort. Their (lack) of support to Enterprise Apps customers is almost legendary. As I have noted before I would really like to see them create "computing appliances" for companies to put into their data centres to build their private cloud infrastructures - GMail boxes, Google Apps boxes and Google Voice boxes to sit in the rack next to the Google Search Appliances. What this would need though is a full support organisation, with the correct corporate mindset - mind you even if they just pushed their full cloud based services through the corporate firewall they would still need this. So perhaps they should get out their wallets and buy an enterprise consulting firm ?
In summary - Google ChromeOS - it's all about the enterprise stupid !
Tuesday, 27 April 2010
CMIS steps away from being officially ratified.
Irina Guseva writing at CMS Wire tells us that the CMSI draft has passed a critical milestone, getting 15% of votes, in the journey to become an officially ratified OASIS standard, read her article here:
CMIS Makes it as an official standard.
She has some quotes from Alfresco, Nuxeo, IBM and Day Software, and its an interesting little read.
This is very important for the ECM industry, but actually from my perspective even more important from an ECM / content management end user perspective. Official ratification of the standard, all out support from the industry, and baking the interoperability features into as many products as possible are a very good thing.
This will make it much more easy (and elegant ?) for SI's or internal IT departments to build systems which work exactly as the business requires, not as the vendor which meets 75% of the requirement wants them to. As you will know if you have read my blog before, the important part of ECM to me is the 'strategy' - not the vision of an ECMS as a monolithic, one size fits all solution to all your unstructured information management problems. Yet I have led procurements where ECM 'suites' from the big vendors have seemed a better solution than trying to fit together disparate pieces to build something from "best of breed" products.
CMIS promises to provide the best both worlds, a middle ground where "plug and play" comes to content management, so lets keep our fingers crossed for the continued development by OASIS and all those who have put in such a great amount of effort so far :-)
CMIS Makes it as an official standard.
She has some quotes from Alfresco, Nuxeo, IBM and Day Software, and its an interesting little read.
This is very important for the ECM industry, but actually from my perspective even more important from an ECM / content management end user perspective. Official ratification of the standard, all out support from the industry, and baking the interoperability features into as many products as possible are a very good thing.
This will make it much more easy (and elegant ?) for SI's or internal IT departments to build systems which work exactly as the business requires, not as the vendor which meets 75% of the requirement wants them to. As you will know if you have read my blog before, the important part of ECM to me is the 'strategy' - not the vision of an ECMS as a monolithic, one size fits all solution to all your unstructured information management problems. Yet I have led procurements where ECM 'suites' from the big vendors have seemed a better solution than trying to fit together disparate pieces to build something from "best of breed" products.
CMIS promises to provide the best both worlds, a middle ground where "plug and play" comes to content management, so lets keep our fingers crossed for the continued development by OASIS and all those who have put in such a great amount of effort so far :-)
Thursday, 4 February 2010
More on Nuxeo DAM
So, how slow am I ? Yesterday I blogged the Nuxeo Digital Asset Management piece, but its been in public beta for months, and I have not noticed - DOH !
However after yesterday's posting, I was approached by Cheryl McKinnon, the Chief Marketing Officer at Nuxeo, someone I have known since she was in her previous role at OpenText.
Cheryl gave me a bit of a "blogger briefing" on Nuxeo DAM because, drum role please ......
Its officially launched today !
You can read Cheryl's own blog post here: Nuxeo DAM - First CMIS-enabled Digital Asset Management - We're Launched!
I got to ask Cheryl some questions based on my background with ECM systems, including some small experience of DAM. When we launched our ECM strategy at the Open University a major requirement was for DAM functionality, after all in a distance learning university DAM and XML 'structured authoring' for true "create once - publish many" type operations are a very big deal.
Nuxeo Q and A with Cheryl
First of all I asked Cheryl about the CMIS angle. CMIS is not a ratified standard yet, and in its first iteration its kind of constrained to simple content operations, nothing DAM specific per se. Cheryl responded that while that is true, the fact that CMIS is already baked into the underlying Nuxeo enterprise platform means it can be levered by the DAM functionality and of course it probably won't take a lot of tweaking of the present implementation once CMIS does hit the big 1.0 Meanwhile it gives developers the chance to play with it, and apparently they are doing as Nuxeo are talking to some open source WCMS vendors about providing their publishing engines ontop of the Nuxeo platform / DAM stack.
If we look at the feature stack, from my admittedly limited DAM experience, it appears that all the parts are in place:
We also discussed the benefits of the "platform based approach" to ECM. With DAM basically being a 'module' ontop of the Nuxeo EP base layer, when other initiatives are released, for example DOD compliant Electronic Records Management (coming soon) then DAM automaticaly inherets the features, allowing you to put digital assets under retention policies etc. Interestingly Cheryl noted that the Pharmaceutical industry appears to be getting into DAM, with a requirement to capture images of product labels etc, so you can see how this might fit their needs.
On the subject of 'coming soon' they are also working on a technical documents (think DITA) 'module' that levers the open source Scenari project to provide XML 'Component Content Management'.
Finally we went somewhat off topic and I asked Cheryl about the competition and whether Nuxeo always ends up on the same RFP's as Alfresco, from company's not averse to open source.
She noted that people always assume the two open source ECMS will be going head to head, but that it rarely happens. Nuxeo and Alfresco have taken different architectural paths, and certainly there are many similarities too, but often they are chasing different business in different sectors. Cheryl noted how Alfresco often go with the 'open source SharePoint killer' angle, with the Alfresco Share collaboration element. Nuxeo apparently are more often looked at to replace a closed source / commercial or an in house developed system, often where the commercial system is one or two major releases behind and would be expensive to update.
To finish off this posting I should say thanks to Cheryl for taking the time to give me a call, and that this is NOT a review. I have not used Nuxeo DAM 'in anger' and I am not endorsing it - but I do support open source enterprise content management software. Open source gives us more choice - it allows me to point you to the download page and say go and get it, and try it for yourself!
However after yesterday's posting, I was approached by Cheryl McKinnon, the Chief Marketing Officer at Nuxeo, someone I have known since she was in her previous role at OpenText.
Cheryl gave me a bit of a "blogger briefing" on Nuxeo DAM because, drum role please ......
Its officially launched today !
You can read Cheryl's own blog post here: Nuxeo DAM - First CMIS-enabled Digital Asset Management - We're Launched!
I got to ask Cheryl some questions based on my background with ECM systems, including some small experience of DAM. When we launched our ECM strategy at the Open University a major requirement was for DAM functionality, after all in a distance learning university DAM and XML 'structured authoring' for true "create once - publish many" type operations are a very big deal.
Nuxeo Q and A with Cheryl
First of all I asked Cheryl about the CMIS angle. CMIS is not a ratified standard yet, and in its first iteration its kind of constrained to simple content operations, nothing DAM specific per se. Cheryl responded that while that is true, the fact that CMIS is already baked into the underlying Nuxeo enterprise platform means it can be levered by the DAM functionality and of course it probably won't take a lot of tweaking of the present implementation once CMIS does hit the big 1.0 Meanwhile it gives developers the chance to play with it, and apparently they are doing as Nuxeo are talking to some open source WCMS vendors about providing their publishing engines ontop of the Nuxeo platform / DAM stack.
If we look at the feature stack, from my admittedly limited DAM experience, it appears that all the parts are in place:
- Intellectual Property and Rights Management - done in situ via metadata and of course CMIS or other API's to link into existing Rights Management systems. Rights Management is very important in this space, I got to work with a brilliant team at the OU that focused ont his, and indeed when I left they were gearing up for a procurement / development of a system to replace all thier little Access databases !
- Renditions - also important for producing different file types which might be optimised for a particular channel. Nuxeo are using ImageMagick as their rendition engine.
- Configurable content types - because not all rich media types have the same metadata profiles associated with them etc So easily defined content types are a good idea.
- Web GUI - very topical as Theresa Regli at CMSWatch blogged on this subject this morning (see "The trouble with DAM and your corporate laptop") based, and does not require any other exotic plug-ins. - so Theresa and prospective iPad buyers will be happy to know that the interface is not Flash
We also discussed the benefits of the "platform based approach" to ECM. With DAM basically being a 'module' ontop of the Nuxeo EP base layer, when other initiatives are released, for example DOD compliant Electronic Records Management (coming soon) then DAM automaticaly inherets the features, allowing you to put digital assets under retention policies etc. Interestingly Cheryl noted that the Pharmaceutical industry appears to be getting into DAM, with a requirement to capture images of product labels etc, so you can see how this might fit their needs.
On the subject of 'coming soon' they are also working on a technical documents (think DITA) 'module' that levers the open source Scenari project to provide XML 'Component Content Management'.
Finally we went somewhat off topic and I asked Cheryl about the competition and whether Nuxeo always ends up on the same RFP's as Alfresco, from company's not averse to open source.
She noted that people always assume the two open source ECMS will be going head to head, but that it rarely happens. Nuxeo and Alfresco have taken different architectural paths, and certainly there are many similarities too, but often they are chasing different business in different sectors. Cheryl noted how Alfresco often go with the 'open source SharePoint killer' angle, with the Alfresco Share collaboration element. Nuxeo apparently are more often looked at to replace a closed source / commercial or an in house developed system, often where the commercial system is one or two major releases behind and would be expensive to update.
To finish off this posting I should say thanks to Cheryl for taking the time to give me a call, and that this is NOT a review. I have not used Nuxeo DAM 'in anger' and I am not endorsing it - but I do support open source enterprise content management software. Open source gives us more choice - it allows me to point you to the download page and say go and get it, and try it for yourself!
Tuesday, 1 December 2009
Google Chrome OS - think enterprise..........
I have said this before, and it appears I have to say it again, you have to consider the 'whole' and not the parts when thinking critically about some of the recent Google announcements.
What brings this on is the way Google Chrome OS got a real "kicking" in a podcast I was listening to on the train on the way to work this morning. "It's crap, it can't do anything without a network connection, its just the Chrome browser, thin computing was tried and failed before, yada yada yada......".
So Google will work with Netbook manufacturers to release "official' machines - so what ? There is the Chromium open source project. "its just Linux" again, so what ? In fact I am not even going to continue down that road.........
Think a little out of the box. My own personal interest is not in consumer computing. I don't care about Chrome OS versus Android on my phone or my netbook, I think about the enterprise space. I think of the implications for information and knowledge management, for ECM and intranets, and I think that a "thin client" based on Chrome OS plus a really good intranet could be a pleasent working experience. However I am also not saying this will work for everyone, so don't flame me because you need full on Windows for printing to your full colour A0 plotter, or for scanning invoices, or your Mac for graphic design, but lets think about it.....
I have ranted about what Google should / could do in the enterprise space before, and I think with their "private cloud" deals with the U.S. Federal Government, so of that might come to fruition, but I recently found this excellent post, which specifically focuses on Google Wave - another product which receives some heavy criticism from those who confess they "don't get it":
Google Wave Killed the ECM Star... George Parapadakis postulates his theory that Wave good have a major impact on the ECM space, for the reasons why I will qoute him directly:
"Why? because the ECM industry, and Document Management before it, was invented as a workaround to compensate for NOT being able to do what Google Wave does...."
Make sure you read the comments as well as his post. JM Pascal builds on the theme with his posting: Wave and ECM, my feelings and opinions. Some may note that all the big ECM vendors ahve been keen to jump on the E2.0 band wagon, with new collaboration tools and web based front ends to their industrial strength back end behemoths, tools such as EMC CentreStage, Oracle Beehive and maybe even SharePoint. So merging collaborative authoring into the wider collaboration tools seems to make sense to me.
However don't forget Wave is also a protocol, an extension / add on to XMPP, and we already have one old "groupware" vendor diving in with both feet, in the shape of Novell and their Pulse product. I am Pulse is just the first of many server products built on the Wave protocol / Wave Server foundation.
This brings another interesting angle to the ECM element - for many years there as has been a monolithic suite (examplified by EMC) approach to ECM software, versus a "build your own from best of breed" approach. So the integration possiblities provided by Wave, alongside initiaves such as CMIS could literally provide options and solutions that I personally am not imaginative enough to dream up right now ! Add open source into the equation, in the form of Alfresco, Nuxeo, MindTouch etc and we literally have a world of possibilities..... :-)
So back to Google Chrome OS. It's an enabler for some simple, low cost, low maintenance - yep almost 'thin computing' - use of either full on public cloud, so called "private cloud" or even just "inside the firewall" LAN based web technologies.
As I have said before, internal Wave, Docs, even the relativley crappy Sites, a GSA etc could enable a decent intranet. Push this to the next level with the latest web based GUI's for ERP and CRM systems, utilization of light weight AJAX toolkits to web enable your inhouse line of business apps, and yes all of a sudden alot of your staff, even sophisticated 'knowledge workers' can exist purely in their browser !
Even in a Microsoft environment, do I need Windows 7 and a full copy of MS Office when SharePoint 2010 is my ECMS, and it provides links to the "online" version of Office 2010 ? Nope Chrome OS would work just fine in that scenario.
Once again we are back to my old hobby horse of taking a truly holistic view of our intranet ecosystems and our information and knowledge management requirements.
Now, if we can just get some of the prominent detractors to think a little before dissing everything that they are not comfortable with, before exploring the possibilities
What brings this on is the way Google Chrome OS got a real "kicking" in a podcast I was listening to on the train on the way to work this morning. "It's crap, it can't do anything without a network connection, its just the Chrome browser, thin computing was tried and failed before, yada yada yada......".
So Google will work with Netbook manufacturers to release "official' machines - so what ? There is the Chromium open source project. "its just Linux" again, so what ? In fact I am not even going to continue down that road.........
Think a little out of the box. My own personal interest is not in consumer computing. I don't care about Chrome OS versus Android on my phone or my netbook, I think about the enterprise space. I think of the implications for information and knowledge management, for ECM and intranets, and I think that a "thin client" based on Chrome OS plus a really good intranet could be a pleasent working experience. However I am also not saying this will work for everyone, so don't flame me because you need full on Windows for printing to your full colour A0 plotter, or for scanning invoices, or your Mac for graphic design, but lets think about it.....
I have ranted about what Google should / could do in the enterprise space before, and I think with their "private cloud" deals with the U.S. Federal Government, so of that might come to fruition, but I recently found this excellent post, which specifically focuses on Google Wave - another product which receives some heavy criticism from those who confess they "don't get it":
Google Wave Killed the ECM Star... George Parapadakis postulates his theory that Wave good have a major impact on the ECM space, for the reasons why I will qoute him directly:
"Why? because the ECM industry, and Document Management before it, was invented as a workaround to compensate for NOT being able to do what Google Wave does...."
Make sure you read the comments as well as his post. JM Pascal builds on the theme with his posting: Wave and ECM, my feelings and opinions. Some may note that all the big ECM vendors ahve been keen to jump on the E2.0 band wagon, with new collaboration tools and web based front ends to their industrial strength back end behemoths, tools such as EMC CentreStage, Oracle Beehive and maybe even SharePoint. So merging collaborative authoring into the wider collaboration tools seems to make sense to me.
However don't forget Wave is also a protocol, an extension / add on to XMPP, and we already have one old "groupware" vendor diving in with both feet, in the shape of Novell and their Pulse product. I am Pulse is just the first of many server products built on the Wave protocol / Wave Server foundation.
This brings another interesting angle to the ECM element - for many years there as has been a monolithic suite (examplified by EMC) approach to ECM software, versus a "build your own from best of breed" approach. So the integration possiblities provided by Wave, alongside initiaves such as CMIS could literally provide options and solutions that I personally am not imaginative enough to dream up right now ! Add open source into the equation, in the form of Alfresco, Nuxeo, MindTouch etc and we literally have a world of possibilities..... :-)
So back to Google Chrome OS. It's an enabler for some simple, low cost, low maintenance - yep almost 'thin computing' - use of either full on public cloud, so called "private cloud" or even just "inside the firewall" LAN based web technologies.
As I have said before, internal Wave, Docs, even the relativley crappy Sites, a GSA etc could enable a decent intranet. Push this to the next level with the latest web based GUI's for ERP and CRM systems, utilization of light weight AJAX toolkits to web enable your inhouse line of business apps, and yes all of a sudden alot of your staff, even sophisticated 'knowledge workers' can exist purely in their browser !
Even in a Microsoft environment, do I need Windows 7 and a full copy of MS Office when SharePoint 2010 is my ECMS, and it provides links to the "online" version of Office 2010 ? Nope Chrome OS would work just fine in that scenario.
Once again we are back to my old hobby horse of taking a truly holistic view of our intranet ecosystems and our information and knowledge management requirements.
Now, if we can just get some of the prominent detractors to think a little before dissing everything that they are not comfortable with, before exploring the possibilities
Monday, 1 June 2009
A new wave in collaboration and communication
So I go off line for 3.5 days to move house and what happens, Google Wave gets announced and demo'd, thats all.... :-)
Wow, is about the best way of describing my initial thought. I don't want to go all gushy and Google Fanboi, but this could be game changing, paradigm shifting etc...
Why ? Well because of their pledge to open source large chunks of the code, and because its a platform and a set of protocols not a product. As stated in the demo they actually want a developer community to grow and help build extensions. As also noted you could download the code and build your own Wave servers for use inside the enterprise firewall.
This is where it gets interesting for me, enterprise use of this platform. I can see all sorts of possibilities based on the video of the demo. I am sure it will not take long for someone to build a Wave to CMIS connection using the open standards and API's, so you could use this browser based communication and collaboration suite with your industrial strength FileNet, Documentum or LiveLink ECM repository, cooool
I will start with pointing you to a link to a Google blog post describing Wave:
"Went walk about. Brought back Google Wave."
This is the most interesting dissection of what it Wave could mean for me, its Dion Hinchcliffe's assessment of what Wave: "The enteprise implications of Google Wave."
I am going to provide a list of other links, to individuals who discuss it as SharePoint killer (don't think its a fair comparison), as OneNote on steroids (don't think so !) to those who worry about the possible implications of its use.
Personally, having only been consulting with blue chip companies for just over a year, I actually been been surprised how conservative big business can be, and I am not sure how many of the biggest companies that could make best use of this platform would actually be able to do so.
I also think that Wave integrated with an appliance based vesion of Google Voice to run inside the corporate firewall would be truly 'awesome' as they say on this side of the Atlantic :-)
So, take a gander at some of these and make up your own minds !
Wow, is about the best way of describing my initial thought. I don't want to go all gushy and Google Fanboi, but this could be game changing, paradigm shifting etc...
Why ? Well because of their pledge to open source large chunks of the code, and because its a platform and a set of protocols not a product. As stated in the demo they actually want a developer community to grow and help build extensions. As also noted you could download the code and build your own Wave servers for use inside the enterprise firewall.
This is where it gets interesting for me, enterprise use of this platform. I can see all sorts of possibilities based on the video of the demo. I am sure it will not take long for someone to build a Wave to CMIS connection using the open standards and API's, so you could use this browser based communication and collaboration suite with your industrial strength FileNet, Documentum or LiveLink ECM repository, cooool
I will start with pointing you to a link to a Google blog post describing Wave:
"Went walk about. Brought back Google Wave."
This is the most interesting dissection of what it Wave could mean for me, its Dion Hinchcliffe's assessment of what Wave: "The enteprise implications of Google Wave."
I am going to provide a list of other links, to individuals who discuss it as SharePoint killer (don't think its a fair comparison), as OneNote on steroids (don't think so !) to those who worry about the possible implications of its use.
Personally, having only been consulting with blue chip companies for just over a year, I actually been been surprised how conservative big business can be, and I am not sure how many of the biggest companies that could make best use of this platform would actually be able to do so.
I also think that Wave integrated with an appliance based vesion of Google Voice to run inside the corporate firewall would be truly 'awesome' as they say on this side of the Atlantic :-)
So, take a gander at some of these and make up your own minds !
- Google Wave - a complete guide
- Google Wave Tsunami or wipeout ?
- Google Wave may challenge Microsoft SharePoint
- Google Wave - interwebs idealism in realtime
- Google Wave drips with ambition. A new communications platform for a new web
- Google Wave - Microsoft OneNote anybody ?
- Terrifying Google Wave
- Google Wave my reshape newsgathering
- Will Google Wave redefine web communications?
- Its new, but not new
- Google Wave tries to rething personal communications
- Google Wave (Brady Morris)
- Why we are cautions about Googles Wave
- The whimpering Google Wave
- The secret sauce behind Google Wave
- Google Wave: What email might look like if it were invented today
Thursday, 26 February 2009
ECM Maturity Model
So I am about 4 days late with this, so it may not be 'news worthy' anymore, but it appears my friends at CMS Watch have joined forces with some of their other friends to develop an ECM Maturity Model - or - ECM3 for short.
The have put up a blog at http://ecm3.org/
You can download the maturity model itself (a PDF document) here: http://ecmmaturity.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/ec3m-v01_0.pdf
Please note that it is available under a Creative Commons license - nice work guys !
So I am not going to wax lyrical about the document, go download it yourself and have a good read :-)
The have put up a blog at http://ecm3.org/
You can download the maturity model itself (a PDF document) here: http://ecmmaturity.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/ec3m-v01_0.pdf
Please note that it is available under a Creative Commons license - nice work guys !
So I am not going to wax lyrical about the document, go download it yourself and have a good read :-)
Wednesday, 25 February 2009
New open source ECM 'appliance' released - updated
Alfresco the open source ECM platform vendor has joined forces with Ingres the open source database vendor to release an 'ECM software appliance' called Icebreaker ECM.
The original Ingres Icebreaker database appliance was released some time ago. It is a cut down version of Linux which includes a base system required to run the Ingres RDBMS on top of it, all packed together in a single easily installable ISO disc image.
So having joined forces with Alfresco, we now have a 570mb downloadable ISO image, providing a complete stack of Linux server, Ingres RDBMS and Alfresco ECMS.
The big question is, how easy will it really be to install and configure ? I will let you know when I get round to buying VMWare or something so I can build a virtual machine to run it in..... :-)
However, I really like the concept, this is the ultimate in try before you buy, which of course is a major benefit of open source software in any arena. Don't worry though, if your CIO or IT Director is 'old Skool' I am sure Alfresco and Ingres will charge you a refreshingly 'enteprise like' amount for support services !
Interstingly they are pitching this easy to instal, easy to manage stack as an open source alternative to Microsofts Sharepoint (MOSS 2007) platform; You can read the press releases here:
Ingres press release
Interestingly I could not find a press release on the Alfresco site yet.
So, it will be good to watch the wider blogosphere / ECM community response to this one, and I am looking for to a 'blow by blow' installation review by someone who has a little more time available than I do at the moment (hint hint....)
UPDATE:
See Alan Pelz-Sharpe's viewpoint on IceBreaker ECM over at CMSWatch
The original Ingres Icebreaker database appliance was released some time ago. It is a cut down version of Linux which includes a base system required to run the Ingres RDBMS on top of it, all packed together in a single easily installable ISO disc image.
So having joined forces with Alfresco, we now have a 570mb downloadable ISO image, providing a complete stack of Linux server, Ingres RDBMS and Alfresco ECMS.
The big question is, how easy will it really be to install and configure ? I will let you know when I get round to buying VMWare or something so I can build a virtual machine to run it in..... :-)
However, I really like the concept, this is the ultimate in try before you buy, which of course is a major benefit of open source software in any arena. Don't worry though, if your CIO or IT Director is 'old Skool' I am sure Alfresco and Ingres will charge you a refreshingly 'enteprise like' amount for support services !
Interstingly they are pitching this easy to instal, easy to manage stack as an open source alternative to Microsofts Sharepoint (MOSS 2007) platform; You can read the press releases here:
Ingres press release
Interestingly I could not find a press release on the Alfresco site yet.
So, it will be good to watch the wider blogosphere / ECM community response to this one, and I am looking for to a 'blow by blow' installation review by someone who has a little more time available than I do at the moment (hint hint....)
UPDATE:
See Alan Pelz-Sharpe's viewpoint on IceBreaker ECM over at CMSWatch
Tuesday, 17 February 2009
Where ECM fits in the bigger information management picture
Anyway, Knowledge Management being a bit of a fuzzy term, it can depend on your personal business context to put it into perspective, but this diagram is meant as a summary of sorts, showing what I consider to be 4 main contributing factors, with just a few of the main factors added around the periphery (click on the graphic for a larger version and feel to share under the Creative Commons, the image is tagged):
So where does ECM fit into this picture. Well its in the conjunction of Information Management and Information & Communications Technologies, exactly where the arrow labelled "efficiency benefits" is pointing !
I look at this way, those that believe in Knowledge Management as a concept generally agree that it is enable by good information management. In its turn content management is about the stewardship of unstructured information, in other words that which does not easily fit into the rows and columns of a relational database. In other words, an ECM strategy can be a vital part of a broader KM strategy.
I look at this way, those that believe in Knowledge Management as a concept generally agree that it is enable by good information management. In its turn content management is about the stewardship of unstructured information, in other words that which does not easily fit into the rows and columns of a relational database. In other words, an ECM strategy can be a vital part of a broader KM strategy.
So should you be rushing out and investing lots of money in shiny new ECM software during the downturn? Well maybe, or you could focus on the management of your information assets, your intellectual property, which is often one of your most valuable sources of competitive advantage. You can do much to improve information management without investing in new platforms, by investing in staff development and education (note thats generic IM education - not 'training' for a specific piece of software!). However if you do have good enough cashflow to be able to invest in software, now would be a good to time to negotiate a good deal from vendors who also need to safeguard thier own cashflow. Of course developing a good business case and ROI arguements for better provisioning the management of your vitally important information is going to be even more important, but whether your ECM requirements are focused on up-front scanning, document and records management, or digital asset and web content (or all of them!) ECM technologies can also help you make the most of your storage environment and your investments in 'tin' via single instane storage, automated retention and disposal and even heirarchical storage management.
So whether your goals are improved efficiency overall, revving up a sagging ECM strategy, or 'knowledge enabling' your organisation, now is as good a time as any to consider your strategies and Prescient Digital Media can assist you in your strategising!
Thursday, 22 January 2009
Autonomy to swallow up Interwoven... (updated)
..... but will it choke on it ?
Hopefully not.... UPDATE - see this CMSWatch post: What next for Interwoven?
Kas asks some good questions in this post, so I wont regurgitate it here - I note my comments to his posting though - A big part of Autonomy is its Virage 'rich media management' product offerings. To me this would seem to fit very nicely with Interwoven's MediaBin Digital Asset Management (DAM) offering. So if you can manage, and search rich media assets, what else do you need, yep a Web CMS so that you can publish them. So, while agree that Autonomy might not leap right pouring money into updating the rather ancient underpinnings of the Interwoven WCM line, hopefully it will 'do the right thing' and update it as part of a 'full lifecycle' digital asset / rich media product line up - which pretty much answers my own question at the bottom of the original post below - yep Autonomy may well become a fully blow ECM vendor.
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Since I heard about this early this morning, I have been trying to find time to do some analysis and blog on it, but to be honest Alan Pelz-Sharpe pretty much nails it (as per usual) with his commentary over at CMS Watch here: http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1481-Autonomy-acquires-Interwoven---A-first-take
Some others I have chatted with today make the same point as Alan, that Interwoven's TeamSite has always been big in the legal sector, and thats a key 'discovery' market for Autonomy, so in some respects the deal makes sense. However in others it does not; e.g. Autonomy picked up Meridio last year, and there is considerable overlap with between their EDRM facilities and some of the features provided by Interwoven.
Sometimes Autonomy appears to be the British IBM - I am fairly sure it makes more money on its consulting and services revenue stream than it does on the licences for the IDOL platform, indeed Alan characterises it as a 'holding company'.
However with enterprise search, e-discovery, EDRM and now Web Content Management and Digital Asset Management solutions in its pocket, do we reqard Autonomy as one of the main ECM players, challenging EMC, IBM and OpenText ?
For sure it will be interesting to keep an eye on this......
Autonomy press release
Interwoven press release
Hopefully not.... UPDATE - see this CMSWatch post: What next for Interwoven?
Kas asks some good questions in this post, so I wont regurgitate it here - I note my comments to his posting though - A big part of Autonomy is its Virage 'rich media management' product offerings. To me this would seem to fit very nicely with Interwoven's MediaBin Digital Asset Management (DAM) offering. So if you can manage, and search rich media assets, what else do you need, yep a Web CMS so that you can publish them. So, while agree that Autonomy might not leap right pouring money into updating the rather ancient underpinnings of the Interwoven WCM line, hopefully it will 'do the right thing' and update it as part of a 'full lifecycle' digital asset / rich media product line up - which pretty much answers my own question at the bottom of the original post below - yep Autonomy may well become a fully blow ECM vendor.
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Since I heard about this early this morning, I have been trying to find time to do some analysis and blog on it, but to be honest Alan Pelz-Sharpe pretty much nails it (as per usual) with his commentary over at CMS Watch here: http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1481-Autonomy-acquires-Interwoven---A-first-take
Some others I have chatted with today make the same point as Alan, that Interwoven's TeamSite has always been big in the legal sector, and thats a key 'discovery' market for Autonomy, so in some respects the deal makes sense. However in others it does not; e.g. Autonomy picked up Meridio last year, and there is considerable overlap with between their EDRM facilities and some of the features provided by Interwoven.
Sometimes Autonomy appears to be the British IBM - I am fairly sure it makes more money on its consulting and services revenue stream than it does on the licences for the IDOL platform, indeed Alan characterises it as a 'holding company'.
However with enterprise search, e-discovery, EDRM and now Web Content Management and Digital Asset Management solutions in its pocket, do we reqard Autonomy as one of the main ECM players, challenging EMC, IBM and OpenText ?
For sure it will be interesting to keep an eye on this......
Autonomy press release
Interwoven press release
Monday, 17 November 2008
New blogs added to Pageflakes ECM site
I can't quite beleive that I was not aware of the InformationWeek Content Managment blog of Peter Hagopian, and the Information Management blog of his colleague, Andrew Conry-Murray.
So I will add the feeds to the Pageflakes.com/ecm resources site.
Interestingly I found these via my Google Alerts, which I only got round to setting up last week, and this morning I had an Alert on my name, as Peter had mentioned one of my articles on the Prescient Digital Media web site in a posting he made back in August called Content Management Acronym Soup. The article he qouted was 'CMS or ECM, What is the difference' and he said I did a good job of 'dissecting them', so my belated thanks to Peter for that nice endorsement !
For many other interesting articles by my colleagues see the main articles page on the Prescient site at: http://www.prescientdigital.com/articles
So I will add the feeds to the Pageflakes.com/ecm resources site.
Interestingly I found these via my Google Alerts, which I only got round to setting up last week, and this morning I had an Alert on my name, as Peter had mentioned one of my articles on the Prescient Digital Media web site in a posting he made back in August called Content Management Acronym Soup. The article he qouted was 'CMS or ECM, What is the difference' and he said I did a good job of 'dissecting them', so my belated thanks to Peter for that nice endorsement !
For many other interesting articles by my colleagues see the main articles page on the Prescient site at: http://www.prescientdigital.com/articles
Monday, 27 October 2008
What is an Intranet anyway ?
A question I ask (and intend to answer) in response to a posting by Shiv Singh on the AppGap blog entitled 'Intranets are not just intranets anymore'.
I am not going to regurgitate Shiv's posting, but I would suggest you go take a look at it. So what do you consider to be an 'intranet' ?
A good place to start is with the wikipedia definition:
"An intranet is a private computer network that uses Internet protocols and network connectivity to securely share any part of an organization's information or operational systems with its employees. Sometimes the term refers only to the organization's internal website, but often it is a more extensive part of the organization's computer infrastructure and private websites are an important component and focal point of internal communication and collaboration." It is acually quite a long page, so you can read it all here.
Interestingly, my opinion on what an intranet is goes back to when I first started in IT, and I would have summarised it as "a private internet" too. Anything that uses internet protocols including HTTP, DNS etc
However it has become apparent to me that many people still consider the 'intranet' to be the "internal website". For some reason they do not consider all the other applications as being a part of the intranet, they just think of the 'corporate home' or news pages as provided by a commercial or home grown CMS. If we take the bigger picture as espoused by the Wikipedia definition though, it opens up the world to an 'intranet ecosystem' which may include your;
Where 'Cloud computing' fits i.e. integrating external, beyond the firewall applications into an existing intranet is another complex, but intrinsically linked question.
Shiv gets really interesting though, when he suggests the intranet might have grown beyond the browser. Using desktop widgets, built using the likes of Adobe AIR or MS Silverlight, we can have Rich 'Intranet' Applications (RIA) that don't need a browser. As noted in a comment on Shiv's posting, less than a year ago I had a serious conversation about using 'Outlook as a portal' - levering MS Outlook's messaging, task management and calendering, with add on's such as integrated RSS reader (now a standard feature of Outlook 2007), the Documentum Client for Outlook (many ECM suites provide an Outlook client) and integration with MS Live Communications server. In the end we did not progress this train of thought. Would it work? Maybe, in an organisation with an MS centric desktop infrastructure.
So what do you think ? You can check out many Intranet 2.0 themed postings by Toby Ward at www.intranetblog.com and even better, you can take part in Prescients Intranet 2.0 survey and help us build the body of research.
Also the slides for 'Intranet 2.0: the future of intranets' are available on Slideshare.net, this is a sneak preview of Toby's session at the Jboye08 conference in Denmark.
I am not going to regurgitate Shiv's posting, but I would suggest you go take a look at it. So what do you consider to be an 'intranet' ?
A good place to start is with the wikipedia definition:
"An intranet is a private computer network that uses Internet protocols and network connectivity to securely share any part of an organization's information or operational systems with its employees. Sometimes the term refers only to the organization's internal website, but often it is a more extensive part of the organization's computer infrastructure and private websites are an important component and focal point of internal communication and collaboration." It is acually quite a long page, so you can read it all here.
Interestingly, my opinion on what an intranet is goes back to when I first started in IT, and I would have summarised it as "a private internet" too. Anything that uses internet protocols including HTTP, DNS etc
However it has become apparent to me that many people still consider the 'intranet' to be the "internal website". For some reason they do not consider all the other applications as being a part of the intranet, they just think of the 'corporate home' or news pages as provided by a commercial or home grown CMS. If we take the bigger picture as espoused by the Wikipedia definition though, it opens up the world to an 'intranet ecosystem' which may include your;
- Information published in the form of web pages via a CMS
- Browser based interfaces to document management systems, your CRM system, your ERP's systems enterprise applications,
- Browser based query and reporting interfaces to your data wharehouse, operational management systems, strategic planning systems, dashboards and scorecards et al
- Browser based access to workspaces, and various other 'collaboration' tools
Where 'Cloud computing' fits i.e. integrating external, beyond the firewall applications into an existing intranet is another complex, but intrinsically linked question.
Shiv gets really interesting though, when he suggests the intranet might have grown beyond the browser. Using desktop widgets, built using the likes of Adobe AIR or MS Silverlight, we can have Rich 'Intranet' Applications (RIA) that don't need a browser. As noted in a comment on Shiv's posting, less than a year ago I had a serious conversation about using 'Outlook as a portal' - levering MS Outlook's messaging, task management and calendering, with add on's such as integrated RSS reader (now a standard feature of Outlook 2007), the Documentum Client for Outlook (many ECM suites provide an Outlook client) and integration with MS Live Communications server. In the end we did not progress this train of thought. Would it work? Maybe, in an organisation with an MS centric desktop infrastructure.
So what do you think ? You can check out many Intranet 2.0 themed postings by Toby Ward at www.intranetblog.com and even better, you can take part in Prescients Intranet 2.0 survey and help us build the body of research.
Also the slides for 'Intranet 2.0: the future of intranets' are available on Slideshare.net, this is a sneak preview of Toby's session at the Jboye08 conference in Denmark.
Thursday, 23 October 2008
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..!
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..!
Wednesday, 17 September 2008
Vendor support for different elements of CMIS - updated
Updated below - response to a question asked in the Webinar
So, I am currently listening to the AIIM webinar on Collaboration, and the intro from IBM, the sessions sponsors, noted something I had not picked up on elsewhere - different vendors have promised to support different elements of the CMIS standard, as in how they will implement the standards dual approaches of Web Services, or RESTful programming:
Vendors supporting both Web Services (SOAP etc) and REST:
As I have already said, it will be interesting to see which vendors back up the rhetoric with action.
Update: I asked the IBM representative (Cengiz Satir Sr. Offering Manager IBM Enterprise Content Management) if they would push CMIS forward to get the WCM, RM and DAM issues covered. He responded that CMIS does not / is not meant to cover these complex use cases as its meant for interoperability of 'Basic Content Services'. Now, he should know what he is talking about because as he mentioned IBM has 4 members on the CMIS committee, however its quite a surprising answer to me.
Jeetu Patel of Doculabs chipped in with a comment on how broadbased interoperabilty standards initiatives can only ever get more important.
So, I am currently listening to the AIIM webinar on Collaboration, and the intro from IBM, the sessions sponsors, noted something I had not picked up on elsewhere - different vendors have promised to support different elements of the CMIS standard, as in how they will implement the standards dual approaches of Web Services, or RESTful programming:
Vendors supporting both Web Services (SOAP etc) and REST:
- IBM
- Alfresco
- SAP
- EMC
- OpenText
- Microsoft
- BEA Oracle
As I have already said, it will be interesting to see which vendors back up the rhetoric with action.
Update: I asked the IBM representative (Cengiz Satir Sr. Offering Manager IBM Enterprise Content Management) if they would push CMIS forward to get the WCM, RM and DAM issues covered. He responded that CMIS does not / is not meant to cover these complex use cases as its meant for interoperability of 'Basic Content Services'. Now, he should know what he is talking about because as he mentioned IBM has 4 members on the CMIS committee, however its quite a surprising answer to me.
Jeetu Patel of Doculabs chipped in with a comment on how broadbased interoperabilty standards initiatives can only ever get more important.
Tuesday, 27 May 2008
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.
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.
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