So what did we learn this year? Apart from the C6 acquisition, no real surprises. Here’s a small summary of what was new for me.

xMS

xMS is new deployment model. The idea is to create a blueprint of your Documentum project and to deploy this blueprint to a VMWare environment without the need of someone installing and configuring everything manually. For larger projects this could mean that you can reduce the time to deploy from days or weeks to just a few hours.

Realtime predictive intelligence

We saw two great examples of how EMC wants to become more intelligent in its content delivery, improving user experience a lot. BOCS is great when having branch offices but content would only get cached if it was accessed first.  The plan is to predict what kind of content users in a certain branch office access a lot and pre-cache similar data. On top of that BOCS will also allow async writes, allowing you to write to BOCS first, who will then asynchronously write content to the content server. You all probably know Amazon’s feature “People who bought this book also bought …”. xPlore will be able to do something similar (We saw a demo in centerstage).

xPlore

There is more to say about xPlore. There will be query based subscriptions, thesaurus support and EMC continues to improve performance as well.

The unified client

EMC announced the acquisition of C6 technology. Are we happy with that? I heard a lot of positive reactions but EMC really has to sort some things out as not everything I heard was positive … Personally I have mixed feelings. For me, D2 is webtop, and X3 is centerstage, based on a common configuration layer.  The common configuration layer is a good thing but you have to be very careful with that. It sits on top of DFC or DFS which means that from an architectural point of view you absolutely cannot implement business logic in that configuration layer or you’re in trouble with other applications. If you do that, you lose all the power of TBO. We know C6 for quite a few years now in Belgium and D2 is not new to me. It’s not a major success here because of what I mentioned earlier, it really just looks like webtop and in terms of customization you’ll hit a wall much more quicker than you will with WDK.

Press release acquisition C6 technology

D7

Conclusion

For the first time since long I have a good feeling about Documentum long term and Jeroen Van Rotterdam plays a big role in that. He has a clear vision and there is a lot of innovation going on. On the short term there is still a lot of confusion about EMC’s UI strategy.

See you next year in Vienna!

Work Manager is a product that offers a lot of things out of the box. This is a very important aspect for decision takers in ECM. In theory this means less maintenance and upgrade costs, reducing the TCO. This is true but I believe in the fact that sometimes small tweaks in how things work can be a big added value for the product. A lot of customizations are of great benefit to the end users and after all, it’s the end user we need to please in a succesful project. Who’s using webtop completely out of the box without any configuration or customization? To be short, configuration and customization is important, and spoken out of experience, a lot of buy/no buy decisions are taken based on that fact as well.

So, how about Work Manager (Enterprise Engineer)? Work Manager is a fantastic product to tweak according to your needs. Roughly estimated, 95% of common adjustments can be done by configuration. During my test I also got the impression that the product is very mature which makes me feel confident about a coming project with Work Manager. I’ve seen EPFM into action but while EPFM is a set of services, integrated within webtop offered by EMC, Work Manager is a real product with a clear roadmap and a future. (EPFM is based on WDK)

Work Manager takes some time to start up but is in my opinion still reasonable for a large application with a rich user interface. Outlook or Word does not pop on your screen in less than a second either (At least not on my system). A small drawback for me is the fact that McLaren has put some business logic in its webservice layer. They had to, due to the fact that they also want to support FileNet with exactly the same set of features. Not a big issue and off course you can still use native Documentum as is together with Work Manager.

Earnings

EMC’s third quartner earnings were good, apart from one particular segment: IIG. For the third time this year, IIG’s quarter earnings were lower than the year before.  No surprise if you ask me. Documentum’s backend system is considered top of the game for many years. Up till a few years ago EMC’s competitors were far off nor did they have any appealing client interfaces. Now they do …

“Revenue from our Information Intelligence Group was $171 million, flat from Q2. IIG continues to transition its offerings to lighter-weight, content-enabled applications on top of xCP using modern virtualized frameworks. In Q3, we announced Documentum clients for iPad, an app which provides users secure access to information and Documentum and enables them to access share and collaborate on their preferred device.”

I’m sorry EMC but this is not convincing either. You’ve worked way too long on a product like Centerstage before it was considered ready for production. You really need to up your stakes or change strategy.

Gartner

Last year EMC was located very close to Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and OpenText in the Magic Quadrant of Gartner. Really difficult to pick a winner. Now, one year later EMC suddenly no longer looks like a real contender to Microsoft Oracle and IBM. Why? Difficult to say. What is important for Gartner and what is not? For my feeling Oracle and Microsoft are slightly better in web content management but there’s still a gap in document or record management compared to Documentum. If someone knows Gartner’s criteria, please let me know.

Oracle

Trade in your Documentum licenses and get Oracle WebCenter for free. What? WebCenter is an enterprise portal that can be used to display information about people, processes and data. I don’t know much about WebCenter but I doubt one can replace Documentum with Oracle’s product. It’s like comparing apples to oranges. You’ll need more that just the WebCenter product to replace Documentum. First impression? A marketing stunt.

Link: Oracle WebCenter blogpost

Update: It looks like more people are sceptical about Oracle’s offer

It’s Momentum next week so I’ll hope to learn more about the direction EMC wants Documentum to go.

All went fine until we received a complaint that a user couldn’t open an extracted attachment. The file appeared to be corrupt. After some investigation we noticed that all of the attachments had a strange file size: 8kb, 16kb, 32kb, 64kb, … What happened? We used .GetBuffer to get the byte array of a memorystream. A memorystream automatically allocates a buffer and when using .GetBuffer you also retrieve the unused bytes. If you only need the used bytes you have to use the ToArray() function.

Strangely enough most of the documents (PDF) opened well in Acrobat Reader, even with the unnecessary/empty bytes.  Only when the empty buffer at the back of the file grew too large, we got an error. After trimming all of the unnecessary bytes at the back of these files all opened fine again.

MSDN describes this behaviour: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io.memorystream.getbuffer.aspx

• Name field: a string
• Value field: could be anything (an “Object” type in .NET)

The WSDL of this Attribute object looks like this

<s:complexType name="Attribute">

</s:complexType>

The SAP proxy

The Value node

               <n0:Attribute xmlns:n0="http://mynamespace">
                    <n0:Name>some string array</n0:Name>
                    <!-- The Value node is manually generated in the SAP proxy -->
                    <n0:Value asx:root="Value" asx:nsd="xsd wsd" 
                              type="ArrayOfString" 
                              xmlns:asx="http://www.sap.com/abapxml">
                        <string>first string</string>
                    </n0:Value>
                </n0:Attribute>

               <n0:Attribute xmlns:n0="http://mynamespace">
                    <n0:Name>some string array</n0:Name>
                    <!-- The Value node is manually generated in the SAP proxy -->
                    <n0:Value xmlns="http://mynamespace" asx:root="Value" asx:nsd="xsd wsd" 
                              xsi:type="ArrayOfString" 
                              xmlns:asx="http://www.sap.com/abapxml
 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
                        <string>first string</string>
                    </n0:Value>
                </n0:Attribute>

Let me describe the process I follow to pick or hire people I want to work together with. First of all I try to avoid the traditional resume based selection and interview. I try to figure out if someone is smart (not just smart off course but “intelligent” and “IT intelligent” if you know what I mean), because if they are they will have the potential to do what is required of them. The best way to find that out is to hang out with them: have a casual conversation in a bar or cafe or event at a restaurant or event. Don’t ask typical interview questions. When you’re out with people you constantly  – subconscious – make judgements about them. Pay attention to what they know, if they can clearly explain and if they are curious. Do they learn? Do they actually understand if you explained something to them they didn’t know of?

Right now you should be able to make a good judgement about how smart that person is, what he/she knows and if his/her personality fits well with you and your team. If not, meet again untill you can make that judgement. If it’s necessary let them meet the rest of your team.

Last but not least: how do you know if they can get things done? First of all if you need someone who needs to get things done, they must have done some things already. This is particulary important when hiring people who just left school. I’ve never come across an excellent programmer who never did even a small project on their own besides school. Ask them for code samples and judge wether it looks good enough for you. Second, let them do something for you. A seperatable piece of code or a really small real-life project. Pay them if you need to.

Is this THE way to find good developers? For me it is. That’s what I did the last few times and have great success with them. If someone thinks they have more success with interview questions about the heap and the stack, threading, or explaining the difference between linq and linq to SQL, that’s what they should do.

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The original and the PDF

We’ve spent many hours on this issue. Appears the setting “Automatically update document styles” which can be found under Tools > Templates and Add-ins is causing it. MVPS explaings why “Automatically update document styles” is usually a bad idea: http://word.mvps.org/faqs/macrosvba/UpdateStyles.htm

McLaren offers user interfaces and a business layer on top of Documentum and Filenet. The solution is in the first place very much oriented towards engineering companies or engineering departments but the software itself is suitable for non-engineering document management as well.

McLaren is definately capable of lifting document management with Documentum and certainly Filenet to a higher level. The software is performant when started up, intuitive and easy to customize (as opposed to Webtop). The integration in Office is much better than what EMC has to offer. Autocad integration is great (xref management) and on top of that you’re making use of McLaren’s experience with other companies. I had the impression that the people at McLaren form a good team and most of them are at the company for lots of years which is usually a good sign. The takeover of McLaren by Idox has also brought some cash to invest in new projects and new people.

Nothing negative? Well, there are some drawbacks. Pricing is definately one of them. McLaren’s Work Manager isn’t one of the cheapest pieces of software around. Also the multiplatform capability can be a drawback. By supporting both Filenet and Documentum McLaren had to transfer some functionality to their own business layer that is placed on top of the DMS.

CenterStage

Ask most experienced emc consultants or users and most of them will say that CenterStage is far from what it could/should be. When EMC first promoted CenterStage, it was seen a combination of an eRoom replacement and a Sharepoint alternative. Right now, it is neither of both. EMC has a partnership with Cisco for a collaboration tool and CenterStage is at this moment the only content management webclient from EMC with a longterm roadmap.

CenterStage has a great user interface, but lacks a lot of features that are available in webtop. Moreover, CenterStage has a much more limited SDK in comparison to webtop can and thus won’t be a valid alternative for many clients.

Webtop

Webtop no longer has a long term roadmap but will sure be around for many years. It’s the most used client and almost everyone uses a slightly, or heavily customized version. WDK is one of the reasons for webtop’s succes. All be it not always that simple or transparent to do, you can customize a lot.

On the other hand, webtop’s major drawback is that’s it’s way too busy (so is CenterStage, but it looks more appealing). Users get lost in all features and menu’s that are available.

Taskspace

Taskspace is great because most applications built with taskspace are simple, limited applications (less is more). However, if you’re doing something else than handling tasks in your inbox, taskspace is the wrong UI to use.