Some former colleagues from the Open University attended the 'Momentum Europe' conference in Athens last week. I had already spotted this press release but have only now got round to examining the release of the new 'My Documentum' family:
"EMC My Documentum Family Delivers The Power of Enterprise Content Management to Every Business User"
The press release has embedded YouTube videos and links to product information pages.
So, my initial thought was, nothing new here, it's just repackaging existing products under a new marketing banner, but its Documentum Client for Outlook (DCO), File Sharing Services etc
Not so ! Discussing this with my old colleague Mark, who was at the conference and very much knee and elbow deep in the Open University Documentum implementation, he said there is considerable new code, and for example with DCO the integration is much slicker, giving a much more 'native' Outlook experience.
This is interesting in the historical context of a blog based discussion with Shiv Singh of RazorFish about "Outlook as the portal" - its your email client, your personal information manager, your contacts manager, calendar, RSS reader etc etc ...... but also your client for your Documentum ECM repository (and other enteprise systems too ?)
To take that topic down a slightly different path, at an AIIM sponsored seminar on SharePoint 2010 this morning, one screenshot showed Outlook 2010 displaying social information gathered from SharePoint MySite profiles.
Yet, unless I am missing something, or doing something really stupid, with Outlook 2007 and SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) you can not simply drag and drop an email from your inbox into a SharePoint document library. Sure you can connect to a document library, it appears in your left hand navigation pane, and will allow you sync the contents of that document library to take them "off line" and on the road with you - but can't just simply move an email into the library ! Nor can you create a 'shortcut' in the Outlook shortcuts view of the left hand nav bar, to a WebDav (Network Places) view of a document library either.
Hurrah (!) to EMC for continuing the client side development, and lets home SharePoint integration with Outlook and particularly email is better in the next version.
Showing posts with label Microsoft. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Microsoft. Show all posts
Wednesday, 18 November 2009
Monday, 13 July 2009
Inaugral Toronto 'SharePointSaturday'
SharePointSaturday's are free conferences, held on saturdays (well duh..) in various cities across the U.S. and this last saturday we had the inaugral Canadian event at Microsoft Canada's HQ in Meadowvale, Mississauga - which just happens to be a 15 minute walk from my new house :-)
It was an excellent event, and thanks most go out to all of the sponsors and speakers. There were huge piles of MS Press and Wrox books, all of which were given away as prizes. Unfortunately I did not manage to win either of the Acer Netbooks, or the 1TB external hard drive, but I did walk away from the day with U.S.$90 worth of info in the form of not one but two MS Press books !
There was 3 tracks, Administrator & Architect, Developer and Special Interest. I did not go to any developer sessions, but here are my brief notes on the ones I did attend:
SharePoint for the masses - Special Interest track, Mushin Shahid of www.sharepointdelivery.com:
A good basic overview of the MOSS and WSS ecosystem. Based around looking at the different slices of the famous MOSS capabilities circle diagram (the SharePoint pizza). Going on the questions being asked this was at the right level for some members of the audience, who obviously are not actually using SharePoint yet. There was some interesting statistics from Mushin on Microsofts use of MOSS; 3 main server farms in Redmond, Dublin and Singapore, with 112,000 (+) site collections with over 325,000 sites and using 14TB of storage. Also a comment about their sales people using MOSS sites as a front end to Siebel CRM data via the BDC.
Social Computing and SharePoint - Special Interest track, Andy Nogueira of Non-Linear Creations:
Andy started with some generic descriptions of 'social computing' type applications, and discussed blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, etc etc in generic terms to get the audience clued in. Interesting stats in this session was FaceBook registered user numbers being bigger than the populations of countries such as Russia, Brazil and Japan !
Andy had '8 pillars of social computing' and a mapping to MOSS features:
It was an excellent event, and thanks most go out to all of the sponsors and speakers. There were huge piles of MS Press and Wrox books, all of which were given away as prizes. Unfortunately I did not manage to win either of the Acer Netbooks, or the 1TB external hard drive, but I did walk away from the day with U.S.$90 worth of info in the form of not one but two MS Press books !
There was 3 tracks, Administrator & Architect, Developer and Special Interest. I did not go to any developer sessions, but here are my brief notes on the ones I did attend:
SharePoint for the masses - Special Interest track, Mushin Shahid of www.sharepointdelivery.com:
A good basic overview of the MOSS and WSS ecosystem. Based around looking at the different slices of the famous MOSS capabilities circle diagram (the SharePoint pizza). Going on the questions being asked this was at the right level for some members of the audience, who obviously are not actually using SharePoint yet. There was some interesting statistics from Mushin on Microsofts use of MOSS; 3 main server farms in Redmond, Dublin and Singapore, with 112,000 (+) site collections with over 325,000 sites and using 14TB of storage. Also a comment about their sales people using MOSS sites as a front end to Siebel CRM data via the BDC.
Social Computing and SharePoint - Special Interest track, Andy Nogueira of Non-Linear Creations:
Andy started with some generic descriptions of 'social computing' type applications, and discussed blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, etc etc in generic terms to get the audience clued in. Interesting stats in this session was FaceBook registered user numbers being bigger than the populations of countries such as Russia, Brazil and Japan !
Andy had '8 pillars of social computing' and a mapping to MOSS features:
- Identity - User Profiles
- Relationships - Colleagues feature
- User experience - easy custom branding of OOB MOSS
- Sharing - communities built using MOSS tools
- Discovery - SharePoint search
- Presence - SharePoint free / busy (full presence with integration with other products)
- Conversations - Forums and integration with Office Communicator (instant messaging)
- Reputation - Ratings and activity
The bulk of Andy's session was basically building an internal FaceBook using Profiles, My Sites and the Change Log, adding 'status' update functionality and some elements of people search. All good stuff, and a very nice presentation.
Content Query Web Part in the wild - Administrator track, Hasan Shahid, SharePoint Delivery:
Hasan and his colleague (to whom I apologize as I forgot to jot down his name) did a two level demo of the CQWP: a configuration of the basic CQWP in OOB mode, to list some data. The then did a slightly more complex demo, building a "Staff directory' using Content Types, Lists and the CQWP. Hasan promised to post the demo PowerPoint with lots of details on his blog at: http://hasanshahid.sharepointdelivery.com/
Arhitecting Records Management Solutions - Architect track, Ken Wong, NetDexterity
Ken is a fan of building RM solutions using SharePoint because it provides the basic building blocks and the flexibility to architect a specific solution. He is not suggesting that OOB 'Records Centre' will be good enough, but that using the exposed web services and other features of MOSS as a development platform, you can build something that meets your requirements. This was an excellent presentation so I hope the slides make it up onto the SharePointSaturdays site.
Leveraging InfoPath forms in SharePoint - Ed Musters. Open Highway Consulting Inc.
InfoPath is certainly not my area of expertise, and Ed claims the form design side of things is not his, but this was an interesting and entertaining session on using the InfoPath forms facilities built into the Enterprise version of MOSS, which can present and processes forms through the browser rather than requiring the InfoPath client. When I was working for Prescient as an intranet consultant, it was always astounding to see how many firms do NOT have online forms, even simple ones for common processes, so it was interesting to hear from Ed that InfoPath can actually import PDF forms (of the download, print out and fill in with a pen variety) and turn them into online forms :-) As always with SharePoint you build a Content Type to support your form, and thus can easily give it a simple workflow.
At the small number of booth's present I BlueThreads 'StoragePoint' solution, and the KWizcom guys gave me a USB drive with presentations and information on their new Taxonomy management web parts.
All in all a very useful and productive day. Now if only I could find some more detials on SharePoint 2010 on the new Office 2010 Technical Preview website.......
Thanks again, to the organizers, sponsors and speakers - your efforts are appreciated.
Wednesday, 8 July 2009
Chrome OS and the enterprise - Updated x 2
(See bottom of page for updates)
As OM Malik noted on his blog, there appears to be a lot of hot air and not a lot of substantive analysis of the news of the week (?) the Google Chrome OS.
You can find some of that hot air here, a list of Google Blog search results for 'Chrome OS':
There is plenty of comment about low spec'd netbooks and cut down OS's not cutting the mustard etc, and why not, the Google 'press release' blog posting does afterall mention netbooks as a specific market. However no one seems to have thought about the bigger picture here, what about the enterprise market ?
Remember Sun and the 'network is the computer' - oh yes, we could be heading back round that circular argument again. I have blogged previously before on the fact that the 'cloud' is not reliable enough for many corporations, but that hosted apps such as GMail, Google Docs, and in the future Google Wave is (or will be) good enough for many smaller businesses - but where are the Google Apps Appliances to sit in the rack next to the GSA ? EMC has certainly talked about 'private enterprise clouds' - building your own 'cloud computing' type environment on your corporate backbone and inside the firewall.
So why would you not put Chrome OS onto desktops, conventional laptops and smaller netbooks (and lets not forget Android powered phones !) to provide the latest in 'thin client' experience in a corporate environment ? Simpler and cheaper support than Windows ?
Stephen Arnold sticks to his theme of looking more deeply into what Google is up to, and is maybe closer to drawing some similar conclusions in his post: Chrome, a shiny wrap for the plumbing of Google
Does anyone else think that when this vapourware becomes solid in 2010, it might be as part of a major push into the enterprise IT scene by Google ? Your own Gmail box versus Exchange ? Wave and Docs versus SharePoint and Office ? GSA versus FAST ? A YouTube appliance as Digital Asset Management ???
Who knows, only time will tell, but personally I think it would be very interesting to see a Wave and Docs based ECMS taking on the big boys in the space ;-)
Meanwhile on my nice new corporate IBM Lenovo ThinkCentre, with its locked down corporate Windowws desktop I am realy missing tabbed browsing, Digsby, Tweetdeck etc............
UPDATE - The Register actually seem to agree with me to some extent, they remember the Network Computer (NC) and wonder if Google might cosy up to Oracle for NC-redux ?
UPDATE #2 - Steven Vaughan-Nichols at ComputerWorld also seems to have caught part of the bigger picture in his posting: Why Google Chrome OS Matters Already on Day 1
As OM Malik noted on his blog, there appears to be a lot of hot air and not a lot of substantive analysis of the news of the week (?) the Google Chrome OS.
You can find some of that hot air here, a list of Google Blog search results for 'Chrome OS':
There is plenty of comment about low spec'd netbooks and cut down OS's not cutting the mustard etc, and why not, the Google 'press release' blog posting does afterall mention netbooks as a specific market. However no one seems to have thought about the bigger picture here, what about the enterprise market ?
Remember Sun and the 'network is the computer' - oh yes, we could be heading back round that circular argument again. I have blogged previously before on the fact that the 'cloud' is not reliable enough for many corporations, but that hosted apps such as GMail, Google Docs, and in the future Google Wave is (or will be) good enough for many smaller businesses - but where are the Google Apps Appliances to sit in the rack next to the GSA ? EMC has certainly talked about 'private enterprise clouds' - building your own 'cloud computing' type environment on your corporate backbone and inside the firewall.
So why would you not put Chrome OS onto desktops, conventional laptops and smaller netbooks (and lets not forget Android powered phones !) to provide the latest in 'thin client' experience in a corporate environment ? Simpler and cheaper support than Windows ?
Stephen Arnold sticks to his theme of looking more deeply into what Google is up to, and is maybe closer to drawing some similar conclusions in his post: Chrome, a shiny wrap for the plumbing of Google
Does anyone else think that when this vapourware becomes solid in 2010, it might be as part of a major push into the enterprise IT scene by Google ? Your own Gmail box versus Exchange ? Wave and Docs versus SharePoint and Office ? GSA versus FAST ? A YouTube appliance as Digital Asset Management ???
Who knows, only time will tell, but personally I think it would be very interesting to see a Wave and Docs based ECMS taking on the big boys in the space ;-)
Meanwhile on my nice new corporate IBM Lenovo ThinkCentre, with its locked down corporate Windowws desktop I am realy missing tabbed browsing, Digsby, Tweetdeck etc............
UPDATE - The Register actually seem to agree with me to some extent, they remember the Network Computer (NC) and wonder if Google might cosy up to Oracle for NC-redux ?
UPDATE #2 - Steven Vaughan-Nichols at ComputerWorld also seems to have caught part of the bigger picture in his posting: Why Google Chrome OS Matters Already on Day 1
Thursday, 11 September 2008
World Peace declared in ECM industry... CMIS is here ! Updated 12th Sept
Updated - I have added additional links to blog posts from Craig Randall and the Observing Content Management blog, that later notes something I had intially missed:
"The following use cases are out of scope for the initial set of deliverables:
________________________________________________________
OK, not quite 'world peace' (wishful thinking eh?) but we must welcome the birth of a new 'standard' the Content Management Interoperability Standard or CMIS to us..... :-)
What does it mean - well I am not sure, I kept of the 'puter at home last night and only picked this up this morning via a 'press release' email from EMC, and I am still digesting it all, but of course plenty of sharper people than I have hit the pressess already, so please check out the links below:
Enter CMIS a proposed ECM-SOA standard - Pie says he is 'almost too excited for words' !
CMIS - be careful what you ask for - MMm' the Big Men On Content seem less excited than Pie...
Announcing the CMIS specification - Microsoft Sharepoint Team blog
Announcing the CMIS specification - MS ECM Team blog
Alfresco releases first CMIS implementation - John Newton of Alfresco
CMIS the new lingua franca of EMC - CMS Watch
ECM standards war: bye bye JSR170 hello CMIS - Bex Huff
CMIS - Craid Randall
CMIS - Observing Content Management
The actual specification (version 0.5 full) is available from EMC developer network here:
http://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-1605
The official press releases are here:
SAP have been mentioned too, but I can't see a press release from them anywhere.
Although CMIS appears to have been an evolutionary off shoot of the stalled AIIM 'iECM' initiative, it is being handed to the OASIS standards body for ratification as a standard. (Hopefully the other vendors will exercise constraint on MS in this one, unlike the ISO fiasco with document standards).
So, enjoy reading that lot, plenty of opinion pieces to follow I expect !
"The following use cases are out of scope for the initial set of deliverables:
- Records Management and Compliance
- Digital Asset Management
- Web Content Management
- Subscription and Notification Services”
________________________________________________________
OK, not quite 'world peace' (wishful thinking eh?) but we must welcome the birth of a new 'standard' the Content Management Interoperability Standard or CMIS to us..... :-)
What does it mean - well I am not sure, I kept of the 'puter at home last night and only picked this up this morning via a 'press release' email from EMC, and I am still digesting it all, but of course plenty of sharper people than I have hit the pressess already, so please check out the links below:
Enter CMIS a proposed ECM-SOA standard - Pie says he is 'almost too excited for words' !
CMIS - be careful what you ask for - MMm' the Big Men On Content seem less excited than Pie...
Dogs and Cats: EMC, Microsoft, IBM, & Alfresco release CMIS - ECMArchitect
CMIS - its not JAS - Chuck Hollis of EMCAnnouncing the CMIS specification - Microsoft Sharepoint Team blog
Announcing the CMIS specification - MS ECM Team blog
Alfresco releases first CMIS implementation - John Newton of Alfresco
CMIS the new lingua franca of EMC - CMS Watch
ECM standards war: bye bye JSR170 hello CMIS - Bex Huff
CMIS - Craid Randall
CMIS - Observing Content Management
The actual specification (version 0.5 full) is available from EMC developer network here:
http://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-1605
The official press releases are here:
SAP have been mentioned too, but I can't see a press release from them anywhere.
Although CMIS appears to have been an evolutionary off shoot of the stalled AIIM 'iECM' initiative, it is being handed to the OASIS standards body for ratification as a standard. (Hopefully the other vendors will exercise constraint on MS in this one, unlike the ISO fiasco with document standards).
So, enjoy reading that lot, plenty of opinion pieces to follow I expect !
Tuesday, 6 May 2008
Yahoo, sport and other stuff
So, after a few days of of being 'dark' or off the net, I am using my sisters computer from her home in Manchester to catch up on email and blogs etc.
It was quite interesting to read sunday papers coverage of the Yahoo - Microsoft spat. In many ways I am glad Yahoo rebuffed the unsolicited approach. In other ways, I wish they had succeeded, because personally I think swallowing FAST and then Yahoo would have just caused internal chaos at Redmond !
Last day at the OU was quite emotional, lots of people, lots of nice words and some lovely presents. I have just spent the weekend with my parents and saying goodbye to them was also quite emotional, but when you consider my 4 year old son is quite happy with the concept of 'Skyping' someone for a video call, and perhaps mores to the point, so is my 75 year old father, then it just shows how technology truly shrinks the world and makes communications simpler for emmigre's :-)
For Alan Pelz-sharpe if your reading - I got to watch Rovers versus Hull FC on Sky with my dad and brother-in-law and a few beers - not the best game ever, but a win for Rovers in the local derby is a win for Rovers, full stop !
So, time to drop off the net again for a while, until we get established in Toronto ! TTFN.....
It was quite interesting to read sunday papers coverage of the Yahoo - Microsoft spat. In many ways I am glad Yahoo rebuffed the unsolicited approach. In other ways, I wish they had succeeded, because personally I think swallowing FAST and then Yahoo would have just caused internal chaos at Redmond !
Last day at the OU was quite emotional, lots of people, lots of nice words and some lovely presents. I have just spent the weekend with my parents and saying goodbye to them was also quite emotional, but when you consider my 4 year old son is quite happy with the concept of 'Skyping' someone for a video call, and perhaps mores to the point, so is my 75 year old father, then it just shows how technology truly shrinks the world and makes communications simpler for emmigre's :-)
For Alan Pelz-sharpe if your reading - I got to watch Rovers versus Hull FC on Sky with my dad and brother-in-law and a few beers - not the best game ever, but a win for Rovers in the local derby is a win for Rovers, full stop !
So, time to drop off the net again for a while, until we get established in Toronto ! TTFN.....
Thursday, 10 January 2008
Microsoft gets FAST
OK, so put your hands up if you saw that one coming ? My crystal ball did not pick it up, thats for sure.......
Is this because MS wish they had bought Convera's RetrievalWare technology ? I guess its possible that FAST's own technology would provide a welcome filip to MS web search, and certainly MS already had a partnership with FAST to put its search behind Sharepoint, or is this about getting RetrievalWare to build out a 'full' enterprise search stack. This would start with Enterprise Search Express at the bottom end, through its bigger brother to the RetrievalWare stuff at the high end, could that be the real reasoning behind this ?
By the way, I have not posted for over a month, for which I apologise, there is plenty of interesting stuff out there, even if the holiday season does slow things down a bit. No, in my case, its the fact that we will soon be leaving the UK for pastures new in Canada. So, posts may continue to be few and far between whilst I attempt to get a lot of stuff done for my current employer, find a new employer, decorate (and sell) the house, oh yes and I better get round to finishing my AIIM BPM course too........
UPDATE: according to the CMSWatch coverage by Adriaan, actually I am the only one hibernating at the back of a cave, and everyone has been expecting this (MS buying FAST, not me moving to Canada.....) :-)
Is this because MS wish they had bought Convera's RetrievalWare technology ? I guess its possible that FAST's own technology would provide a welcome filip to MS web search, and certainly MS already had a partnership with FAST to put its search behind Sharepoint, or is this about getting RetrievalWare to build out a 'full' enterprise search stack. This would start with Enterprise Search Express at the bottom end, through its bigger brother to the RetrievalWare stuff at the high end, could that be the real reasoning behind this ?
By the way, I have not posted for over a month, for which I apologise, there is plenty of interesting stuff out there, even if the holiday season does slow things down a bit. No, in my case, its the fact that we will soon be leaving the UK for pastures new in Canada. So, posts may continue to be few and far between whilst I attempt to get a lot of stuff done for my current employer, find a new employer, decorate (and sell) the house, oh yes and I better get round to finishing my AIIM BPM course too........
UPDATE: according to the CMSWatch coverage by Adriaan, actually I am the only one hibernating at the back of a cave, and everyone has been expecting this (MS buying FAST, not me moving to Canada.....) :-)
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