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.

EMC World post conference follow up

Word of Pie has a nice post as post conference follow up on the many posts he made from the conference and indeed he lists other bloggers who are tackling the same subjects, I wont repeat the lists here, just go read Laurences posting'

Main point from me, fingers crossed that Magellan is as good as the demo's suggest it might be !

The Magellan presentation and info - updated x 2

I am not going to repeat his post, or attempt analysis yet, but go read Laurences posting to get a nice overview of the Collaboration session and details of what to expect from ECM's Magellan:

Introduction to EMC’s Next-Generation Knowledge Worker Client

Thanks to Laurence for his diligent blogging :-)

Update #1:

Also James at ChiefTech dives in with a small posting: EMC's Documentum and eRoom gets a 2.0 make over with "Magellan"

Big Men On Content: EMC Documentum Will Not Go Quietly Into that Dark Night

Channel Web: EMC Unveils Content Management, Collaboration Services Roadmap

And of course, as this is the new '2.0' aware EMC, keynote video's are already up on YouTube :-)

Update #2

Whitney's demo of Knowledge worker stuff is in the Mark Lewis keynote starting at part 5 and Magellan or 'Essentials' is in part 6 , and the 'rich media' / digital asset management client in part 7 - the video is not great so you don't get a really good view of the interfaces

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chuck Hollis on Social Media

I don't know if your aware of Chuck Hollis of EMC, I have been reading his 'external' o r 'main' blog for sometime, but having followed a link from there, I came across his 'other' blog: A Journey In Social Media - this is fascinating stuff taking the reader along with Chuck as he leads the move to instill social media awareness and use within the worlds sixth biggest software company.

If your not aware of 'A Journey.....' I suggest you go right back to the beggining and follow the story through. What is really interesting in our own internal context is the early postings on EMC's use of its own eRoom's product - one colleague suggesting we lift the text of one posting and make it our 'eRoom usage policy' :-) (p.s. Chuck - we haven't done this !)

I have to say I am happy that we seem to have foreseen most, if not all of the issues Chuck notes, and put policy in place to prevent them. However our use of eRooms is for 'content centric' collaboration (linked to Documentum Content Server) or the more traditional eRoom 'project management' use case, and definately not the social media 'conversational collaboration' use case that Chuck is looking to spread.

I noticed some other postings which themselves suggested the amount of postings about 'collaboration' seem to be on the increase, thus it must be a trendy, or hot topic. Now I know there are arguements that humans have been collaborating since we discovered fire and developed language, but I also think we can't deny that the new 'social networking' dimension and the various "Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0" tools bring some new elements to the mix, and I like Chucks definition of "conversational collaboration" - perhaps its time for a "Collaboration Maturity Model" (oh no, another CMM, only kidding....!) :

Messaging Centric Collaboration (eMail / IM) -> Content Centric Collaboration (DM / ECM) -> Conversation Centric Collab (forums / blogs / wikis)


Chuck's team decided to go with Jive Software's Clearspace - an excellent product by all due accounts, but not one I think we could afford, so whilst we don't get the benefits of the integration, we are developing 'skins' for our internal WordPress, MediaWiki and PHPForums systems to give as common a user experience as we can.

Butler Group ignoring EMC's Business Process Management ?

What an interesting day this is turning into. So, this morning I sat in on a demo by one of our Documentum experts for our Research School. They have a requirement to build a 'system' to handle research grant submission, which is currently mired in the "email with Word attachments" chaos. Andy did a great demo of a rapid prototype he had banged out using Documentum workflow and content lifecycles, whilst I chipped in with a demo of eRoom (for general collaboration around the grant submission process).

4 hours and many meetings later, I get an email saying I can download Butler Groups new report on BPM, so I did. Now, I have not read it properly yet, but I flicked through the 'Technology Audits' chapter - no sign of EMC ! OK then, on to the 'Vendor and Product Profiles' chapter - still no sight whatsoever of the EMC Business Process Suite , which since the integration of the ProActivity product line is a lot more than 'just' Documentum Workflow. I am a tad surprised by this omission, but perhaps when I have read the full document it will make sense (??).

Interesting times

So it all started with a quick session of blog reading last night, and a comment by my friend Laurence over on Word of Pie; he quite rightly, and very gently takes me to task for being a tad cynical in a previous posting. However, although I am very interested in most of the phenomena that currently have a 'two point oh tag' added to them, I truly hate the trend / fashion to make everything a ' 2.0 ' - so in many respects Laurence is absolutley right, the definition of ECM 2.0 is whatever we want it to be, and it can be delivered whenever the vendors and more importantly the customers, decide they are ready for it.

But... (and there is always a 'but' somewhere eh ?) its not quite that simple is it ? Nah, it never is......

So, I am attending CMF2007 in Aarhus next week to present a case study on the work we have undertaken so far on redeveloping our Intranet. Our CIO has always said that he see's the Intranet to be completely wound up with ECM, and I agree, its all simply different facets of 'information management', and as I always say in presentations on ECM, collaboration or whatever, its absolutely not about the 'tech' its about policy and procedures and most of all people, i.e having a policy on what works best presented on a static web page, a wiki, or as an MS Office 'document' in the ECMS.

So, notwithstanding the fact that the whole " Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 " bubble could burst at any moment (follow the link to Steve Rubels take on this), lets examine what is out there, that we can add to our ECMS to make it ECM 2.0 - and I mean stuff available now, not in even the near future.

For a start John McKendrick over at FASTforward asks if 'web 2.0' is the business persons revenge for SOA ? Because SOA projects have become so large and complex, is the emergent goodness of Web 2.0 tools the only way business people can actually get their hands on useful collaborative tools ?

Well, to progress, let me give you three links to postings from Dion Hinchcliffe at ZDNet on Enterprise 2.0, in order:

• The State of Entperprise 2.0
  

• SaaS and Office 2.0 evolving towards Enterprise 2.0
  

• Significant workplace inroads for Entperise 2.0
  

The first posting gives a good review of Andrew McAfee's SLATES acronym. Lets see where ECM systems fit in 'SLATES' shall we ?

S = Search; one of the main arguements often given in the business case for ECM is the improvements in findability brought by having your content in a system which can manage metadata and provide metadata and full text indexing search - so 1 for ECM ?

L = Links; the deep linking between information using URI's - well a lot, of not most (or even all) ECMS now use persistent URI / URL to link to all content items - so thats 2 for ECM.

A = Authoring; ensuring all users have access to easy authoring tools - well not necessarily a good score for ECMS' on this one, even with built in MS Office connectors etc, or the ability to write small pieces of content using inline editing tools in the browser, when you add the burden of user created metadata etc then we might be slightly failing on this one - so ECM score now at 2.5 ?

T = Tags; or Metadata in other words. The more users get used to web 2.0 consumer systems, or even tagging their MP3 collections, the easier it is for them to understand the use of metadata in the enterprise. So, ease of use might not be overwhelmingly great, but ECMS have been doing 'tagging' for a long time, so ECM 3.5 for 4 ?

E = Extensions; extend knowledge by mining patterns and user activity. Well in my opinion any good ECMS should let you mine user activity data and report on whats going on in the system, even provide hooks for MI reporting or BI tools. So, 4.5 ?

S = Signals; make info consumption efficient by 'push', RSS feeds etc Well some ECMS are better at this than others, but even if they revert to the 'old fashioned' technology of email for their notifications and alerts, again a standard feature of ECMS' is the ability to subscribe to content and be informed if the content is changed updated etc, so final score could be 5.5 out of 6 ?

So what do you think ? Do current generation ECMS at meet the SLATES test of Web 2.0 goodness, within the context of enterprise information management ?

If you want, go to the second of Dion's postings, and do a your own checklist against the longer acronym of FLATNESSES - there is overlap with SLATES, but where the ECMS probably falls over is on F for 'Free form' and E for 'Emergent' and the S for 'Social' but then that all depends on how strident you are at applying Prof. McAfee's criteria. For example Documentum's eRooms is a collaborative system which part of EMC's ECMS (I could not resist that concatenation of our favourite 4 letters), and you can absolutely build social networking and social interactions in an eRoom, even if its not exactly Facebook.

The final of the 3 posting's in examining the take up of tools in the enterprise addresses the cultural element, and this should not be underestimated. The majority of the core 4,500 staff of my employer would probably be characterised as 'knowledge workers' under most definitions of the term, and yet I.T literacy is (IMHO) quite low. So getting alerts and notifications from the ECMS via email may add even more crud to your inbox, but are your staff ready for a mass migration to RSS feeds and feed readers ?

Back to a tenous link between this and my attendance at CMF2007 to talk about our intranet. We have been examining portal software technology, and have seen's demo's from big players like IBM and BEA. Over at the BEA en.terpri.se blog there is a posting on "why enterprise 2.0 matters, its about how people interact" and to me this brings us back round, full circle. It does not matter if your talking about an enterprise portal, an eRoom for a discrete group, the blogs used as 'news' sites by project teams, a wiki used by developers to document their software, in the end it should all be easy for the average end user to get to grips with, and should facilitate content centric collaboration and improved findability, and that call is taken up by Dan keldsen with this posting, where he asks the question 'who puts the C in ECM'.

So, to complete this long posting, and go round full circle, even if my cynism (or British pessimism) is sometimes misplaced, to truly get all of what is discussed above into a truly 'enteprise' wide content management, probably requires the SOA / standards based approach as espoused by Laurence. But even if the technology was perfect, your people might not be, so stop to consider how you get them to use this stuff ! (see comments on this at the Tower Software blog).

eRoom versus Sharepoint

There has been some discussion in the blogosphere about EMC’s strategy ref MS Sharepoint (MOSS 2007), the new Documentum integrations with Sharepoint and where eRoom fits into the picture, including a new comparison by Laurence over at Word of Pie, so this is my own take on the whole thing.

I do not have first hand experience of MOSS 2007, which is possibly not a good place to start ! I do have experience of SharePoint Portal Server 2003, including setup, configuration and administration. I also have experience with eRooms Enterprise 7.3, which is part of the Open University ECM system.

OK, firstly, why does EMC’s product strategy seem a little confused on the whole working with Microsoft as a partner, versus competing against Microsoft in the collaboration space ? Well how about because EMC is a very big company, with lots of divisions, and I have to say from bitter personal experience, it occasionally appears that the right hand does not communicate too well with the left hand……. that apart, some will say you can still be both partner and competitor with the same third party in today's complex business environment.

MS Sharepoint is a phenomena whether you like it or not. Thus AIIM has dedicated a blog and a multi-city seminar tour to this subject. Plus many ECM vendors have decided not to fight MS on this turf, but instead to use Sharepoint in the portal role as an alternative front end to their ‘proper ECM’ systems at the back end. This has led to all sorts of confusing messages about Sharepoint providing “Basic Content Services” (could we not have picked a different acronym, as a BCS is already a Business Classification Schema!) whilst ‘real’ ECMS provide the more sophisticated features.

However we digress, back to collaboration features and Sharepoint versus eRoom. On a feature by feature comparison, the two products look pretty evenly matched. I decided to borrow some generic headings from a third party rather than direct from MS, so this is from BlueArc and is based around their view of Sharepoint for collaboration, and my take on where eRoom fits in their categories

Improve team productivity

• Give users the ability to create and control their own collaborative workspaces. Make it easy for teams to adapt workspaces to the needs of the project - eRoom does this too, with devolved , easy to manage roles based access


• Manage projects more efficiently with the project tsk list template. Visualise task relationships and project status with automated Gantt charts – yep, eRoom provides built in Project Management tool and also has an MS Project “Viewer” which allows users who don’t have a copy of MS Project to view Project files.


• Coordinate teamwork with shared calendars, alerts and notifications. Connect team calendars to the desktop with Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007 – eRoom also connects / synchronises calendars and task lists to your Outlook


• Communicate with team members in context using presence and instant messaging – eRoom has IM via its very simple ‘intercom’ tool, or proper integrations to get full IM and presence information.


• Make it easy to include and work with team members from outside the organization – eRoom allows authentication against LDAP sources, or allows an administrator to create accounts directly on the eRoom system – ideal for ad hoc collaboration with external contributors.

Author, review and publish documents

• Use document workspaces to streamline the document creation process – eRoom allows you to do this, and even better if you have eRoom Enterprise gives you the linked folders capability, allowing users to push content into a Documentum Content Server repository.


• Enable disconnected participation with offline support – I admit this one is not so easy with an eRoom !


• Manage the document lifecycle with integrated Enterprise Content Management (ECM) capabilities – see above, but do they mean Sharepoint integrating with other third party ECMS, or is this a rather over-blown description of the ‘document libraries’ feature ?

Streamline people-driven business processes

• Deploy standard site templates to improve common people driven processes like issue tracking – eRooms can be templated


• Drive out process variation with workflow – simple workflow can be achieved in an eRoom, or the eRoom can be part of a tightly integrated process based application when integrated with Content Server.


• Create collaborative applications using integrated application development capabilities – eRoom even uses the same MS technologies, .net and Active Server Pages to achieve this.

Create, capture and share community knowledge

• Broadcast information with blogs and Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
• Capture community knowledge with wikis.
• Encourage dialogue with surveys and discussions.

Ok, you will notice no comments appended against the last 3. I have spent the Product Advisory Forums at Momentum Anaheim (2006) and Orlando (2007) asking for out of the box integrated RSS in eRoom, and I think this is its biggest deficit at the moment – but to be honest how many organizations have really grasped enterprise RSS so far ?

As for Blogs and Wiki’s – well, horses for courses. You could be using a blog or wiki instead of an eRoom, if those tools that fit your requirements better. To be honest if you could easily (i.e. out of the box GUI configuration) change the eRoom discussion forums to post comments “the other way up” i.e. blog style, last posting at the top, you could use a forum as a blog. Also if you want to (and we do some of this) you can use the ‘page’ object in an eRoom and let multiple people edit it – instant simple Wiki page (OK, I know I am pushing the boundaries on that one……).

However in my opinion eRoom has plenty of stuff that’s advantageous over Sharepoint as a collaboration product. Its easier to administer (in a sys admin context), its designed for project teams from the outset – so for instance once a project is complete, you can export and entire eRoom as an XML file and store it as a record (I know big U.S. law firms that do this), It also has its synchronous meetings module, giving shared whiteboarding, Powerpoint presentations, shared apps and desktops etc.

Finally, in the Documentum D6 universe (coming soon…..) eRoom really becomes a Microsoft .net based interface to the Documentum Content Server system, providing a full integration, so that for instance, all your collaboration objects in the eRoom could be placed under seamless (and invisible to the end user) records management.

In conclusion, as a stand alone, web based collaborative workspace system, I think eRoom beats MOSS 2007, with its Portal, Document Management, Web Content Management bi-polar confusion. Is Sharepoint a “jack of all trades and master of non” – only time will tell.