sumanthmolakala.com… thoughts addressed!

I was at the EMC world today and it was quite productive. I noticed Pie covered the keynote session well but couldn’t make it for Victor’s session. I tried myself to get to Victor’s session as soon as I could (ran into a buddy of mine on the way and lost some precious time) but was able to listen to the session standing. Here’re some notes:

• The apps built using xCP will be have run-time performance optimization module in 2.0 (sometime EOY 2011)
• Future of full-text (DSS) will be built upon xDB using indices held in Lucene (FAST will become history)
• DSS will have native security
• CMIS will be supported in 6.7 or later (meaning, you can open a Production powerlink ticket)
• NULL value in an attribute is not really “null” (“0″ bytes) but it will be in D6.6
• DQL will support inline view queries
• DQL will support pagination
• The next versions of CS will have the ability to choose ATMOS as one of the stores
• JMS fail-over support in the next version
• DMS fail-over support in the next version
• UCF.net for non-java shops
• Kerberos support in the next version
• Last but not the least, xDB will replace RDBMS altogether some time in the future!

If you folks want to connect and catch a beer in the evening, please send me a note – mailme (at) sumanthmolakala (dot) com

Its always interesting when a company as big as Microsoft makes it way into a new niche and the leader in that domain accommodates to co-exist. Make no mistake, its a strategic move from both sides but the challenge is to help our customers strategize ECM solutions keeping long-term in mind. This is my $0.02 to understand where we are heading and how to plan for it.

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I had experienced various interesting encounters with EMC support, but lately, I feel like they are just getting arrogant… I guess it comes with the size (Documentum to EMC) and its layers. Here are some to ponder…
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BOF is critical in getting business logic and processes implemented accurately *enterprise* wide. And its capabilities play significant role with development, deployments and migrations. First of all, I have to be honest and say how much I adore the BO framework in Documentum. When the first version came out, I loved it and loved the control it offered. And soon realized how the BO functionality wasn’t being invoked on machines where BO registration wasn’t done. And it was taken care of in 2.0, but it was not recommended to use dbor.prop although it was backward compatible. This intangible setup on a machine (using 2.0), leaves you hanging when things do not work. And the fact that individual interfaces/implementations for each business object need to be deployed OR define the same jar over and over for each business object if you decide to club all together – not perfect yet…
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Documentum’s BPM is one of those technologies which business can’t wait to implement. The evolution from the Workflow Manager to this is quite remarkable. And, in all fairness, I should also say that its gotten quite temperamental over time, rightly so, at the rate at which the features are being added in.
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I was recently asked by a technologist on how to go about adding a new active directory sync which is not supported by Documentum. As I was thinking through it, I remembered that James McGovern had posed this question in the past – Why does Documentum need its own user store when it can use other systems which are developed solely for this purpose?
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The success of a production deployment can be analyzed with the amount of support which goes into maintaining and/or trouble-shooting the application. One of the challenges in a production release tends to do with the workflows. Several times in the past, I had to run variety of queries to identify various combination of results relating to workflows. In the process I developed this cheat sheet for myself which gives a quick overview of the workflows and what you have to query for.

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The most important aspect of integrating two systems is to assure that there is a solid hand-shake and that the communication is accurately handled. Consider this transaction between Input Accel & Documentum:

Export Module> Request is made to create an object type for document
Content Server> returns Object id
Export Module> Set attributes for document
– network error –

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This past few weeks we have been trying to interview and place a technical consultant for our project and it turned out to be quite a challenge. I had my share of unique experiences and here are some:

• This guy claimed himself to be an architect and had about 5 years of experience. I start to wonder if folks understand what it takes to be an Architect (its a separate article unto itself)? And so, I start interviewing him and he is not even close to what he claims to be. He’s not a senior developer to begin with – asked him a question from his project as to why he took a certain approach among the options and he had no clue. And brought up the security model and he couldn’t even describe what was setup, much less why its done that way. Although he was better technically (all on a relative scale) than few others we interviewed, the mere fact that he over-sold himself turned out to be the worst mistake.

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For those who hadn’t had a chance to review Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management, 2007 from Gartner Inc., would be interested to know that IBM is positioned as the Leader for its ability to execute and completeness of vision. EMC is immediately following it and according to Mark Lewis, President, Content Management and Archiving Division at EMC, launch of Documentum 6 Platform and recent acquisition of X-Hive Corporation, supports organization’s in place vision and strategy. Unless IBM makes any major releases or strategic moves, EMC might very well be in the leading position next year. OpenText and Oracle are also positioned in the Leader’s quadrant.

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