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.
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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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 –
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.
Content, by definition, is difficult to categorize and provide structure; and XML technology, by definition, is a general-purpose markup language and is classified as an extensible language because it allows its users to define their own tags. The flexibility offered by XML technology makes it a natural fit for the complexity posed by the Content Management Systems.
When designing Content Management System for an organization, the architects inevitably spend time designing the Taxonomy for the content. It is enormously important from the business stand point to organize the content to be able to logically access it the way we would find paper based files in the huge locked away cabinets (this very line exposes the disconnect).
Now, I am here to question the ROI on this.
