AIIM day in Toronto

Today I attended the AIIM "From Collaboration to Process Control: Whats the ideal information management strategy for your organization" (phew, bit of a mouthful) day at the Toronto metro convention centre - and a jolly good day it was too !

The first "October AIIM event" I attended in Toronto was 3 years ago, before I was even living here (we were on our trip to get 'landed' status) and they get better and better.

John Mancini, President of AIIM kicked the day off with a great opening session. He noted some updates on the ever growing mountain of digital content and the ever increasing speed of growth, but also noted that Moore's Law for raw computing power (CPU power) has been surpassed by improvements in communications technologies (providing ever greater bandwidth) and storage technologies (how much you can cram on a disk plater.) John suggested we are rapidly approaching a tipping point with respect to content volumes and content management technologies. In the great tradition of AIIM "8 things about" lists, John presented 8 key points:

1. You can't dodge the content tidal wave
2. Ubiqitous computing has an impact on both creation and consumption of content
3. Green issues - the new selling point for ECM - get rid of all that paper !
4. You simply can't do everything manually anymore (ref: business processes)
5. "Social everything" - humans are social animals, go figure......
6. Collaboration needs governance - I certainly agree with this one
7. We are moving into an era of simplicity - if records management is perceived as a nusiance by 95% of your users, then your solution better be simple
8. Mismanagement risks are rising - and not only in the highly litigous U.S. of A !

At one point John made the point that 80% of the worlds Lawyers are in the U.S., after John a gentlemen from Autonomy did a brief session as they were a key sponsor of today's event, and he gladly noted when describing their healthy financials that this was largely thanks to all those lawyers.......

The interesting point from the Autonomy presentation was the "management in place" of records in SharePoint installations using their 'ControlPoint" product, not one I knew much about previously.

After a quick hello to Ross, Doug, Kim and John from the Royal Bank of Canada's ECM centre of excellence (I see them here once a year !), it was off to the elective sessions:

Hyland Software did their normal 'transactional content management' pitch for OnBase. It's an effective and slick presentation of the message, and I have seen it a couple of times before. I have seen OnBase in use in the insurance industry when I was consulting and I can see its strengths in these transactional scenarios.

As the next session was all scanning / imaging / capture in both rooms, I disappeared back into the boothes of the small 'show hall' for a lovely chat with the ladies from Oracle. My current employer is a big Oracle user on the database front, but I have always liked the product formerly known as Stellant, which is of course now Universal Content Management within Oracles Fusion middleware portfolio ! The shock on Michelle's face when we told her you could not access Hulu from Canada...... :-)

The next session was AllStream who had some interesting case studies around combining Unified Communications with portals, which is close to our heart as we are a SharePoint shop and we are about to go live with MS Unified Communications soon.

For the final break out session I broke my promise to go and support Oracle UCM and attended the Microsoft "ECM for the masses, how to deliver on the promise" session. This was a good session by a Product Manager who had obviously honed his skills at the 'big party' in Las Vegas last week. It was not a full on SharePoint 2010 product pitch, but more a generic examination of the issues characterised as the tension between: Control and Compliance on one hand, and Freedom and Flexibility on the other.

Personally I chose to receive part of the message on SharePoint governance issues as "SharePoint proliferation, well thats your fault....." (mmmm' nothing to do with Microsofts marketing machine then?). Having said that our presenter then focused on moving forward, and that a major aim for SP2010 is the 'democratization of ECM', in other words it does not have to be control and compliance versus freedom and flexibility, but rather it should be a balance with contextual equalibrium being sought for each particular project or implementation.

We all went back to the main hall for a presentation from HP on Universal Records Management (URM, a bit too close to UCM ?) in other words the product formerly known as Tower's TRIM.

Then it was time for a quick chat with the marvellous Cheryl McKinnon, the new CMO for Nuxeo
the open source ECM platform. Cheryl forecast a tipping point of her own, that finally within the next two years the open source vendors will be taken seriously. With Nuxeo, MindTouch and Alfresco on the plot, I would agree with her. Strangely enough, for a massive Canadian company, Cheryl's old employer OpenText had not decided to grace the event with its presence.

Finally, John Mancini closed us out, with a final keynote that was as entertaining and as informative as his introductory one. John noted that the latest AIIM "8 reasons" paper (8 reasons you need a strategy for managing information - before its too late) is available as PDF, Kindle eBook, Sony eBook and formats I have never heard of, plus you can even download an audio book version from iTunes !!

Oracle buys Sun, but what does it mean for CM ? Updated

Updated 21st April - Please scroll down and read the comment left by Jorge from Liferay, who thank for keeping on the straight and narrow as far as the LifeRay portal :-)

So much for the earlier rumours of a joint Oracle-HP bid for Sun, instead the lean (?) mean acquisition machine goes for it again !

However swallowing the whole of Sun Microsystems with its own micro-processor designs, serious server hardware and its own operating system is not the same as taking onboard JDE, Siebel et al.

Nope, this one is going to take some more digesting, and could give Oracle some serious heart burn. However lets leave the discussion of indigestion for later analysis, instead lets think a little about what this means on the information management and content managment front;

Well first of all, Sun did not provide a CMS or an ECM system at all, so whats the big deal you might ask ? Java is the big deal I will respond !

The Java language and platform is a very big deal in enterprise IT, and it is of course the underpinning platform and architecture for many a content management system. Many pundits where worried about IBM getting their blue fingers all over Java, but is stewardship going to any better under Larry Ellison's team ? I really don't know and jury is going to be out on this one for a while, as is the whole issue of Oracle and open source in generally, highlighted by how Oracle will deal with the MySQL database.

Web portals are another confusing area, Sun had pretty much deprecated the old Sun Portal in favour of another open source product, LifeRay. However Oracle has swallowed up more portals than you can 'shake a stick at' (as we say in Yorkshire). So I don't see LifeRay getting a lot of attention when there is already the work being done to meld all the best elements from the old BEA (PlumbTree) AquaLogic product line into the WebLogic line to emerge as the Oracle WebCenter suite.

As for the hardware, well I can see where Sun's new massively hyper-threaded CPU's will provide a great platform for egually massive Oracle databases, and its ZFS file system and disk storage systems will provide a full on Heirarchical Storage Management (HSM) environment below Oracle Universal Content Management (aka Stellent).

So as they say in North America, Oracle can provide the full 'soup to nuts' enterprise IT environment:
1. Servers and highly robust operating system (Solaris)
2. storage (disks arrays, file systems and HSM elements)
3. The database !
4. Middleware
5. Applications (be they ECM, CRM, ERP, messaging and collab etc...)

I am still trying to figure out what the Yorkshire version of soup to nuts is? "From Ale to Yorkshire Pudding"........??

Perhaps the 'alternative' stack might be offered at the lower end of the spectrum ? Oracles' 'Unbreakable Linux' plus MySQL plus LifeRay..... etc on HP or other partners hardware (on Intel x86 architecture).

Well, all we can do now is spectate, so pull up a comfy chair, and lets sit and watch the spectacle unfold before our very eyes.... :-)

EMC should bid for Sun !

I have been really busy with on-site client work for a few weeks, and have numerous clients with 31st of March deadlines, busy busy, but I have been wanting to respond to Pie's posting: Documentum and the Search for Search for over a week now.

However then we get the "IBM to buy Sun" bombshell...... :-)

All good fun eh. So I thought I would tackle both issues with one posting. Why ? Well as you can see from the 'provocative' title, I don't think EMC should buy a search engine, I think they should buy Sun Microsystems.

Firstly in direct response to Pie, EMC don't 'need' to buy a search engine, they can put some resource and investment into the open source Lucene search engine, which Pie does mention in his post. Now having said that there are a lots of search engine vendors out there, so there is bound to be some good technology to snap up if they wanted to.

But why not invest more strategically - and buy Sun ? What would they get, well lots of synergistic product lines, and things they dont currently have;

• Storage: Not just the Sun storage hardware, which may or may not have technology which could add value to EMC's storage products (I am not a storage geek so I don't know), but also software - even Solaris and its ZFS file system

• Server hardware: Why shouldn't EMC have a line of servers including some serious CPU technology to go with their storage hardware? Sun could be regarded as the progenitor of current cloud computing and its 'big iron' would be great for Mozy and other EMC cloud initiatives.
  

• MySQL: All future versions of Documentum developed to run on their own RDBMS platform ? Again I am not a database geek either, but I do know that Oracle is generally considered as the best platform for Content Server, so would MySQL cut the mustard?
  

• Java: Well, EMC are "the worlds sixth biggest software company" so why not own Java ?

• Portal: Either Sun Portal or LifeRay (OK, LifeRay) - a great investment for a full 'soup to nuts' information management environment, a portal to sit over Content Server and CenterStage

Well, I know its probably got a 'cat in hell's chance' of happening as we say in Yorkshire, but its fun to postulate the theory. I did see a tweet yesterday suggesting the author had a good source which had sugested Oracle and HP might put in a joint bid for Sun, HP for the hardware and Oracle for the software. Personally I think it would be better for the industry if Sun's tech was not swallowed by either IBM or HP. As for the software, many are suggesting IBM would not be a good owner for Java - I am not so sure on that front, but you can see why Oracle might want to get its hands on both Java and Solaris.

So, come on EMC, get your cash and impress us all, buy the company and do innovative things with the tech !

Linking collaborative content creation to web publishing

Complicated title eh ?

Well this post stems from both yesterdays Oracle tech session and from a conversation I had at CMF2006 in Arhus with James Robertson of Two Step Designs (Sydney, Australia), so its quite a complicated story to start with !

In his workshop session at the conference James was lamenting that sometimes fail because they get overly complex, often because of trying to use a single platform for everything, instead of using the right tool for the right job. If you have never spotted James slides on Slideshare.net or seen his sessions, he suggests intranets are used for four main purposes:

• Content

• Communication

• Collaboration

• Activities
  

His point was that you don't need a single system or even a single platform to do all these things, but that it makes much more sense to use the right tool for the right job. So, you might provide publishing facilities, news and interactive 'eForms' via a WCMS, but if collaboration is a big thing for you, then you should buy a specialist collaboration system such as EMC eRoom or Lotus Quickr etc

He also suggested he had never seen a nice, full end to end integrated system where users could collaborate around content in the collaboration system, but then easily send it through the workflow to be published on an intranet site via the WCMS (including if necessary, linking to documents from and EDRMS). I think James was also suggesting (and I am sure he will jump in and correct me if I am wrong) that he is not a big fan of the big "ECM suites" (back to right tool for the right job ?).

Anyway after I got back to the UK, and the Open University, I got to thinking that we could have created such a setup with our full set of EMC products, but that it would have needed some custom code written to glue it all together. My 'design' if you like, would have people working on collaborative authoring in an eRoom, drop the resultant content item into a 'linked folder' – (which is a folder in which the content really resides in the main Documentum ECMS repository). From there it could be workflowed into the Documentum Web Publisher sub-system and published to the required site on the intranet. Like I say with the version 5.25 / 5.3 products we had at the time, this certainly would not have been 'out of the box' and no body, but no body I talked to back then had a very good opinion of Web Publisher as a WCMS.

However, EMC put quite a bit of effort into improving Documentum version 6 (D6) Web Publisher, and of course they were going to rebuild eRoom as .Net based web services oriented interface on top of the D6 repository. Moving along to where we are now with the D6.5 product set and we are talking about Web Publisher based blogs and wikis and eRoom is going to be replaced by CentreStage (ex-codename Magellan).

So could we be getting towards the seamless 'suite' based intranet, which does allow the use of the right tool for the right job, but by providing all the relevant tools built up from the same underlying platform ? Well not 'all' the tools, but the collaboration and content management ones, with any other application you like being surfaced via portlets in a portal ???

So, are Oracle already there ?

At the demo yesterday we saw collaboration via an enterprise portal (WebCentre Interaction – aka ALUI) with blogs and wikis etc built on the WebCentre Services infrastructure, passing content into the UCM repository (Stellent) and publishing it out via the UCM WCM module (which could also have been Oracle portal or WebLogic portal based external sites). As I said yesterday, I always had a high opinion of Stellents technology (and their web publishing was way better than Documentum) and I was also a big fan of BEA Aqualogic (Plumbtree). < Please note I may come back and edit this post, but putting links to all the Oracle products above, but tonight all the said links are sooooo slow, I can't be bothered to wait ! >

So it all looked good and pretty seamless in the demo – I guess the only thing that might put James off would be the price – lets face it, buying this is not going to be cheap....... OK possibly a sweeping statement, but lets face it, your probably going to need an 'enterprise class' budget ! But then I have always said that ECM should be treat as a major infrastructure investment, not as a 'point solution' application buy.

Oracle E2.0 Tech Briefing

This morning I got to attend an excellent briefing session at the Oracle office in Mississauga (only a 30 minute bus ride from my house !). It was the Enterprise 2.0 Tech Session, and it was very informative.

The first session or 'keynote' (if you can really call it that for such a small session) was an overview of, and positioning of Oracles product sets in the Enterprise 2.0 context. This was great for me perosnally because I have to admit to not having put a lot of effort into keeping up with their moves in this area since they gobbled up BEA. A lot of this session included references to McKinsey and AIIM Market IQ reports on E2.0, to Wikinomics, the long tail etc It was also noted that there is a major push within Oracle to embed E2.0 principles, features and functionality in all product sets, across the Fusion middleware, the traditional RDBMS and even the CRM and ERP applications suites.

Session 2 got a lot more into the product road map and the technical details.

We all know that Oracle have done a lot of said 'gobbling up' via acquisiton and merger activity, and in the ECM and portals space, I really liked Stellants content management offerings and was also a fan of BEA AquaLogic on the portal front. So it was great to see some of the integration efforts, and I know understand that alot of BEA's technology appears to have gone into Oracle's WebCentre product set. Very interestingly AquaLogic User Interaction (where do they come up with these names) or ALUI for short, has become WebCenter Interaction and is being pitched as the 'easy to implement' or 'out of the box' portal solution, while both Oracle Portal and WebLogic are being pitched as the developer frameworks on which to build your highly customised, purpose built environment (WebLogic for the big, high transaction customer facing sites, and Oracle Portal for the enterprise intranet market ??).

This to me is cool, as there was a lot of conjecture that ALUI would become the poor relation, but actually Oracle has taken a lot of the very well received and critiqued BEA web services 'middle ware' plus the ALUI tools like 'Pathways, Ensemble and Pages' which were all designed to enable 'business users' to develop mashups, simple data access applications and to add content rating and tagging. Anyway, I digress......

The full WebCentre 11g product set will be available next year, but not dates yet.

The third and final session majored on the use of Oracle Universal Content Management (UCM - the products previously known as Stellent) to manager web sites in an E2.o context. Lots of mentions of Information Rights Management (IRM) technology for securing information shared with partners and the 'communities' you might be involved in, largely for meeting 'brand protection' requirements. The session also had details on the digital asset management functionality available in UCM, although to be honest, I did not see anything new that I have not seen in many previous Stellant demo's.

Whilst I think I may post again on what I learnt today, I will finish off this posting with a link to a video we were shown this morning: Enterprise 2.0 User experience

Oh yeah, you should also check out Billy Cripes Fusion ECM E2.0 and ECM blog.

Oracle expands its ECM offerings - updated

So it looks like Oracle is catching up with EMC and IBM by fleshing out their ECM portfolio with the news that a new 'Universal Online Archive' product will join the Fusion middleware portfolio, alongside the Universal Content Management and Universal Records Management products (those formerly known as Stellent).

There is also an email archiving element to this release, so it really is widening out their portfolio to match that of the big boys. Personally I was always impressed with the Stellent product set, so it will be interesting to see how both current Oracle users, but more importantly new customers buy into the Oracle vision for Information Lifecycle Management.

Update: See Alan Pelz-Sharpe's take on this at CMS Watch

The only constant..... is change...... (updated)

Well thats certainly the recent trend in the wider information management market place ! So Oracle finally got their hands on BEA. This now gives Oracle 4 enterprise portal software offerings - confusing future there eh ?

Actually two postings already offer some analysis / comment. Janus Boye over at CMS Watch offers his usual insightful analysis of how the four portals fit together. I don't think I am being particularily insightful myself, when I say this is appears to be all about SOA and the middleware stack, BEA technology being generally regarded as good. However I am no expert on SOA nor do I have indepth knowledge of the BEA or current Oracle middleware stacks.

However to follow up on comments Laurence made over at Word of Pie, where despite my rash of spelling mistakes in my comment (it was late) Laurence branded me the eternal optimist. I shall explain. What I said was that the best integration I have seen between a portal and EMC's Documentum is that provided by the 'Knowledge Directory' feature of BEA Aqualogic User Interaction (the product formerly known as Plumtree Portal). So, wouldn't if be nice if Oracle sold off ALUI and ECM could snap it up ? This would give an nice alternative front end to EMC's content management suite, and perhaps a serious alternative to MOSS in the 'ECM for the masses' market ??

And then....... Sun buys MySQL.... !

Update: Actually this posting on the Portals and Content Managment blog (PCM.blog) gives a nice short summary of recent activity, and asks the question whether EMC will acquire a Portal / Middleware stack ?

And; Toby Ward over at Intranets.blog pulls together some more Oracle / BEA analysis in this posting.

We're back

from Canada, got our Social Insurance Numbers and our Permenant Resident Cards are in the post (or will be soon !) so we are legally employable in Canada as off now :-)

Been pretty much 'off the air' whilst on vacation, checking the work and private email accounts occiasionally, but lots of blogs to read when I get over my jet lag (never seem to be able to sleep on the plane.....).

Got to look into the Oracle / BEA thing - one vendor with 4 portal products - doesn't sound like a marriage made in heaven to me, but I have to admit more analysis required. Back soon......