You will find it at: http://contentperspective.se

Shifting focus from bestsellers to niche markets
In 2006 the editior-in-chief of Wired magazine Chris Andersson published his book called ”The Long Tail – Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More”. Maybe even the text printed on the top of the cover saying ”How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimted Demand” is the best summary of the book. This might have been said many times before but I felt a strong need to put my reflections into text after reading this book. It put a vital piece of the puzzle in place when seeing the connections to our efforts to implement Enterprise 2.0 within an ECM-context.

Basically Chris Andersson sets out to explain why companies like Amazon, Netflix, Apple iTunes and several others make a lot of money in selling small amounts of a very large set of products. It turns out that out of even millions of songs/books/movies nearly all of them are rented or bought at least once. What makes this possible is comprised out of these things:

- Production is democratized which means that the tools and means to produce songs, books and movies is available to almost everybody at a relatively low lost.
- Demoractization of distribution where companies can broker large amount of digital content because there is a very low cost for having a large stock of digital content compared to real products on real shelves in real warehouses.
- Connecting supply and demand so that all this created content meets its potential buyers and the tools for that is search functions, rankings and collaborative reviews.

What this effectivly means is that the hit-culture where everything is focused on a small set of bestsellers is replaced with vast amounts of small niches. That has probably an effect of the society as a whole since the time where a significant amount of the population where exposed to the same thing at the same time is over. That is also reflected in the explosion of the number of specialised TV-channels and TV/video-on-demand services that lets views choose not only which show to watch but also when to watch it.

Early Knowledge Management and the rise of Web 2.0
Back in the late 90-ies Knowledge Management efforts thrived with great aspirations of taking a grip of the knowledge assets of companies and organisations. Although there are many views and definitions of Knowledge Management many of them focused on increasing the capture of knowledge and that the application of that captured knowledge would lead to better efficiency and better business. However, partly because of technical immaturity many of these projects did not reach its ambitous goals.

Five or six years later the landscape has changed completely on the web with the rise of Youtube, Flickr, Google, FaceBook and many other Web 2.0 services. They provided a radically lowered threshold to contribute information and the whole web changed from a focus on consuming information to producing and contributing information. This was in fact just democratization of production but in this case not only products to sell but information of all kind.

Using the large-scale hubs of Youtube, Flickr and Facebook the distribution aspect of the Long Tail was covered since all this new content also was spread in clever ways to friends in our networks or too niche ”consumers” finding info based on tagging and recommendations. Maybe the my friend network in Facebook in essence is a represention of a small niche market who is interested in following what I am contributing (doing).

Social media goes Enterprise
When this effect started spreading beyond the public internet into the corporate network the term Enterprise 2.0 was coined by Andrew McAfee. Inside the enterprise people where starting to share information on a much wider scale than before and in some aspects made the old KM-dreams finally come into being. This time not because of formal management plans but more based on social factors and networking that really inspired people to contribute.

From an Enterprise Content Management perspective this also means that if we can put all this social interaction and generated content on top of an ECM-infrastructure we can achieve far more than just supporting formal workflows, records management and retention demands. The ECM-repository has a possibility to become the backbone to provide all kind of captured knowledge within the enterprise.

The interesting question is if this also marks a cultural change in what types of information that people devoted their attention to. One could argue that traditional ECM-systems provide more of a limited ”hit-oriented” consumption of information. The abscense of good search interfaces, recommendation engines and collaboration probably left most of the information unseen.

Implications for Enterprise Content Management
The social features in Enterprise 2.0 changes all that. Suddenly the same effect on exposure can be seen on enterprise content just as we have seen it on consumer goods. There is no shortage of storage space today. The amount of objects stored is already large but will increase a lot since it is so much easier to contribute. Social features allows exposure of things that have linkages to interests, competencies and networks instead of what the management wants to push. People interested in learning have somewhere to go even for niche interests and those wanting to share can get affirmations when their content is read and commented by others even if it is a small number. Advanced searching and exploitation of social and content analytics can create personalised mashup portals and push notifcations of interesting conent or people.

Could this long tail effect possibly have a difference on the whole knowledge management perspective? This time not from the management aspect of it but rather the learning aspect of it. Can we expect a much larger amount of the available content to be consumed or used by at least a few people in the organisations? Large organisations have a fairly large number or roles and responsibilities to there must reasonably be a great difference in what information they need and with whom they need to share information with. The Long Tail effect in ECM-terms could be a way to illustrate how a much larger percentage of the enterprise content is used and reused. It is not necessarily so that more informtion is better but this can mean more of the right information to more of the right people. Add to that the creative effect of being constantly stimulated by ideas and reflections from others around you and it could be a winning concept.

Sources

Andersson, Chris, ”The Long Tail – Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More”, 2006
Koernan, Brendan I, ”Driven by Distraction – How Twitter and Facebook make us more productive workers” in Wired Magazine March 20

In normal day-to-day conversations around a table it is generally considered rude to ignore what someone is saying or even refrain from answering direct questions. Over the phone or a voice chat it is similar but body language isn’t communicated (unless using video chats) and you can therefore afford to look bored, do faces or whatever while somebody is talking in the other end. As long as we are doing synchronous (real-time) voice communication a lot of the social rules for IRL seem to apply.

When the mobile phone rings you either answer or don’t but most people choose to call back at a later time to see what that person had on their mind. To me that is a good example of a social rule in modern society. Can one expect someone to call back if we have bothered to call them? Or is the social rule that if it important (enough) you expect someone to try again? Is therefore a repeated set of calls in a short matter of time a sign of urgency?

Getting an text message (SMS) notifying me that I have a voice message usually also signfies a sense or urgency or importance which I usually find results in a call back to me. However, I believe here is another area where we see a change in social interactions because the mobile phone is always with us and always on. Many people today bring their phone everywhere which includes meetings,vistit at friend’s and dinners. That means that is has been regarded ok to not answer because you are not able to talk at that specific time. Reasonable that has also meant that people choose not to answer when someone is calling and you don’t feel like talking to them.

Text chats seem nowadays to bridge synchronous and asynchronous communication. In one sense it is real-time because you can interact very rapidly and if both are typing really fast it can become a fast paced discussion. In general I also think that in the early days of Instant Messaging (IM) the siginificance of a text chat was higher than it is today. If you got that pop-up window with a bleep I usually switched my focus on that and bothered to answered directly. Today, we see IM going really mainstream and becoming a part of corporate infrastructures often with the argument of replacing some emails. That means that IM text chats are to some respects a replacement of asynchronous messaging (often email) where you type something up which does not really require an immediate response but something you want your co-worker to be aware of. You know that people are in meetings, talk to people around them and therefore can’t be expected to pay attention to all incoming IM-messages right away. That IM-message has then became an asynchronous message that gets read minutes or even hours later. Socially that must mean that there is an acceptance of IM-messages not being answered to directly and therefore not considered a rude behaviour. However, I do believe that it is a little but rude to ignore replying to an IM at all or at least mentioning that in an email or the next IM-chat.

I personally think it is really cool to be online at all times but the question is if that also means a committment(personal domain) or responsibility (corporate domain) to also answer and interact as soon as you can? In my personal domain I think the way IM is used has changed a bit over the years. In the early days of iChat we were intensely chatting often but nowadays it has almost shifted that an IM is done only when you have something important to say and therefore almost “worthy” of a phone call but just almost. The way IM works is that it usually doesn’t require your full attention the way a phone call does. Nowadays you do IM while doing something else.

I wonder if this means that all means of communcation changes in the way we see them as requiring our attention or how important they are to us. We I got my first Internet connection back in 1995 I think I considered an email being somewhat the same as an old-fashion letter. It was carefully drafted and sent with some sense of importance and thus requiring an answer. Over time email also became a way to share information “for-your-information” rather than something requiring a direct reponse. Email became a way to share information more casually. Compared to writing a letter it is so much easier to copy a text or just send a link to a web page. More of anything can often mean that the sense exclusiveness goes away somewhat, unless you are in love of course when I guess many love messages only make things better in most cases.

Social media (such as FaceBook) brings the sharing aspect of information to a whole new level. Nowadays you can share your current situation where you express what you are doing, how feel and what you are about to do. Thing that differes social media networks from web pages with information is that it usually assumes you have some sort of relationship to people who you are sharing your information with. The information is personalised and therefore to a higher degree targeted by you. Just as you expect a reaction to something you say over dinner about what is happening in your life I guess many people who post their “status” on FaceBook hope or desire some kind of reaction to it. Congratulations to good things that happen and expressions of compassion when bad things happen in their life. So as we are getting more and more information about people around us the questions how we do handle the social rules about all this social information. Is it rude to not read or try to keep up-to-date about someone you know? Do you expect comments from these people around events in your life? Is a FaceBook message something that require an answer just as we might think of an email or an IM-chat?

No matter if how reactions or response will arrive the increase of information streams (should we call personal ones life streams?) coming from sources you have chosen will most likely affect people who consume them to some degree. In an era of mass information and need for affirmation it can be confusing when different people apply different social rules to all these communication possibilities. Some people apply the social rules of IRL strictly and get offended when people don’t follow them. Others are very relaxed about the whole thing and don’t feel obliged to do anything at all. The thing that confuses me is when the level of obligation is determined out of someones particular view of a specific tool rather than their relation to the person they have a relationship with.

• Performance. 1 FAST Full-text node supports up to around 20 Million objects in the repository (some customers commented that their experience were closer to 10 M…) and it requires in memory indices. With Documentum installations containing Billions of objects that means 100+ nodes and that has been a hard sell in terms of hardware requirements.
• Virtualisation. Apparently talks with Microsoft/FAST about the requirement on supportin all Documentum products on VMWare made no progress. This has been a customer demand for some time. MS/FAST cites intensive I/O-demands as a reason why they where not interested in certifying the full-text index on virtualisation.
• NAS-support.
• More flexible High Availability (HA) options. Today FAST can be clustered by adding new nodes which leads to a requirement of having the same amount of nodes for backup/high availability.

From a performance stand-point I personally think that the current implementation of FAST lead to slow end-user experience when searching in Documentum. One reason for this is that a search is first triggered to FAST which then delivers a search result set irrespective of my permissions. Instead the whole result set must be filtered by quering it towards the relational database. That takes time. This is also a reason why we have integrated an external search engone based on the more modern FAST ESP 5.x server with Security Access Module which means that acl:s are indexed and filtering can be done in one step when searching in the external FAST Search Front-end (SFE). More about how that is solved in ESS later on.

From a business perspective EMC outlines these challenges they see a need to satisfy:

• End users expect Google/Yahoo search paradigms
• IT-managers want low cost, scalable, ease of deployment and easy admininstration.
• Requirements for large scale, distributed deployments with multiingual support.
• Enterprise requirements such as low cost HA, backup/restore and SAN/NAS-suppprt.

New new ESS is based on the xDb technology coming from the aquisition of the company X-hive and leveraging the open source full-text indexing technology in the Lucene project. The goal for ESS is to leverage the existing open indexing architecture in Documentum. The idea is both to create a solution that really scales but of course with some trade-offs when it comes to space vs query performance.

ESS supports structured and unstructed search by leveraging best of breeed XML Database and XQuery Standards. It is designed for Enterprise readiness, scalabiity, ingestion throughput and high quality of search as core features. It also provides Advanced Data Management (enables control where placement of data on disk is done) functionality necessary for large scale systems. The intention is to give EMC to continue to develop and provide new search features and functionality required by their customer base.

It is architected for greater scalability and gives smaller footprint than current Full-Text Search as well as scale both horisontally (more nodes) as vertically (more servers on the same node). It is designed to support tens to hundreds of millions of objects per node.

This allows for solutions such as Archiving where there can be Billion+ emails/documents while preserving the high quality of search while still achieving scale. The query response time can be throttled up or down based on needs – priority can be shifted between indexing and quering.

The installation procedure is also simplified and EMC promises that a two node deployment can be up and running in less than 20 minutes. The solution is also designed to easily allow to add new nodes to an installation.

ESS is much more than a simple replacement of the full-text engne. It will focus on deliver these additional features compared to existing solutions:
- Low cost HA (n+1 Server based)
- Disaster Recovery
- Data Mangement
- VMWare Support
- NAS Support
- New Administration Framework

The new admin features includes a new ESS Admin interface which has a look and feel very similar to CenterStage. Since the intention is to support ESS on non-Documentum installation it is a separate web client. The framwoork also supports Web Services, Java API, JMX and it is open for administration using OpenView, Tivoli, MMC etc.

The server consists of:

• ESS API
• Indexing Services will have document batching capability, callback support for searchable indication and a Content Processing Pipeline with text extraction and linguistic analysis via CPS.
• Search Services. This will provide search for meta-data, content or both (XQuery based) as well as multiple search options such as batching, spooling, filters, language, analyser etc. It will return results in a XML format and provides term highlight, summary and relevancy. The thread execution management support multi-query and parallell query. It also includes low level security filtering.
• Content Processing Services is responsible for language detection, text extraction and linguistic analysis. The CPS can be local or remote (co-located with content for improved performance). It will have a pluggable architecture to support various analysers and/or text extractors. It will include out of the box support for Basis RLP and Apache SnowBall analysers. However only one analyser can be configured per ESS. (My question: Can I have different analysers on different nodes?). Content Processing can be extended by plugins.
• Node and Data Management Services is the primary interface for all data and node management within ESS. It provides ability to control routing of documents and placements of collections and indices on disk. It deals with index management and supports bind, detach, attach, merge, freeze, read-only etc.
• Analytics includes API’s and Data model for logging, metrics and auditing, ingestion and search analysis and facet computation services.
• Admin Services. The example shown was really powerfull very an admin could view all searches made by a user by time and see what time it took to first result set. The one with a longer time could be explored by viewing the query to analyse why it took so long.

Below that the xDB can be found and in the botton the Lucene indices. The whole solution is 100% Java and xDb stores XML Documents in a Persistend DOM formats and support XQuery and XPath. Indices conists of a combination of native B-tree indices + Lucene. The xDb supports single and multi-node architecture and has support for multi-statement transactions and full ACID support. In additon it supports XQFT (see introduction it here) which is a proposed standard extension to XQuery which includes:

• LQL via a full text entension
• Logical full-text operator
• Wildcard option
• Anyall options
• Positional filters
• Score variables

ESS includes native security which means that security is replicated into the search server and security filtering is done on a low level in the xDb database. This means effective searches on large result sets and enables facet computation on entire result sets.

Native facet computation is a key feature in ESS which is of course linked to the new search interface in CenterStage which is based on facets in an iTunes-like interface. Facets are of course nothing new but it is good that EMC has finally realised that it is a powerful but still easy way to give users “advanced search”.

ESS Leverages a Distributed Content Architecture (for instance using BOCS) by only sendning the raw text (DFTXML) over the network instead of the binary file which can be very much larger in many cases (such as big PowerPoint files). ESS also utilizes the new Content Processing Services (CPS) as well as ACS.

The new solutions also makes it possible to do hot backups without taking the index server down before as it is today. Backup and restore can be done on a sub-index level. The new options for High Availability include:

• Active/active shared data (the only one available for FAST)
• Active/passive with clusters
• N+1 Server based

Things I like to see but have not heard yet:

• Word frequency analysis (word clouds based on document content)
• Clustering and categorisation (maybe done by Content Intelligence Services)
• Synonym management
• Query-expansion management
• How document similarity is handled by vector-space search (I guess done by Lucene?)
• Boosting & Blocking of specific content connected to a query
• Multiple search-views (different settings for synonyms, boost&blocking etc)
• Visualisation of entity extraction and other annotations
• Functionality or at least an API to manually edit entity extraction within the index. Semi-automatic solutions are the best.
• Freshness management.
• Speech-to-text integration (maybe from Audio/Video Transformation Services)

Personally I think this is a much needed move to really improve the internal search in Documentum and make much better use of the underlying information infrastructure in Documentum. It will be interesting to see what effect this has on Microsoft/FAST ambitions to support the Documentum connector. Maybe the remaining resources (no OEM to develop) can focus on bringing the connector from an old 5.3 API to a modern 6.5 API. I still see a need for utilising multiple search engines but as ESS gains more advanced features the rationale for an expensive external solution can change. The beta for Content Intelligence Studio will be one important step in outlining the overall enterprise search architecture for big ECM-solutions. In this lies of course tracking what Autonomy brings to market in the near future.

Another thing worth mentioning is that I during the past four conferences have heard quite a few complaints about the stability of the current FAST-based full-text index. It crashes/stops reguarly and often without letting anybody knowing it before users start complaing about strange search results.

A public beta will be released in Q3 2009 and customers are invited to participate. Participants will recieve a piece of hardware with the ESS pre-installed and pre-configured and after a few configuration changes in Content Server it should be up an running.

Customers will have the option of upgrading existing FAST full-text index  or run the new ESS side-by-side with FAST. ECM will also market ESS for non-Documentum solutions.

Be sure to also read Word of Pie’s notes as well as my previous notes from FAST Forward 09 around the future of FAST ESP.

First of all many thanks to EMC for listening us and improving a lot of things from the last year. I have been to EMC World 07 and 08 and during both these occasions I felt a little lost as a Documentum customer among all these storage and virtualisation people. Back then I heard people referring with love to past Momentum conferences where the sense of community was there. In November 08 I had the chance to go to Momemtum in Prague as a speaker and it was actually a bit different from EMC World. Suddenly all the focus was on Documentum.

Things well done

So the establishment of a Content Management & Archiving (CMA) Community was just what we all needed. We all got yellow ribbons with text “Momentum” to attach to our badges which made us all much more visible to each other. We got all the sessions in the same area which meant no more running around and the chance to bump into people with those ribbons. Intead of having a very thick catalogue with all sessions merged together into a giant schedule we got our own CMA Show Guide which was really easy to use and made life much easier to me. Next to all the sessions we had a beautiful  Momentum Lounge which was manned all day around. You could even meet CMA executives for drinks after sessions on Wednesday and Thursday. It had nice sofas and chairs togeter with soft red lighting which made it quite cosy. In the solutions exhibitions all CMA Booths were gathered in the same area with a separate graphic profile then the rest of the EMC booths. Around the CMA booth you found all the CMA partners co-located. Finally we had our own CMA Party on Monday evening which was well attended as far I saw. In addition to that we finally seem to have a working online community both for Documentum and XML Technologies.

[View with PicLens]

There was also a great thing to create a Blogger’s lounge where all people who blogged and Twittered could register. Outside the lounge there was a large screen displaying what we all were saying more or less live. And the Vanilla Latte served there was a life saver! On Tuesday their Barista started making mine as soon as I passed the entrance What a service! I think EMC actually made social media into a working business tool here. Really something to build on. If you have not done it search for #emcworld on Twitter to see what it was all about.

I attened one Product Advisory Forum (PAF) around the new Enterprise Search Server (ESS) and that was a great experience. Ed Bueche and Aamir Farooq did a great job to inspire great discussions between us customers and the engineering team. I attended PAFs in Prague as well and those were also a great part of the conference.

We had access to wireless internet all around the conference area and that is vital for a conference like this. Especially for us who Blog and Tweet!

Things to improve

First of all EMC is a company which has a payoff saying “Where Information Lives” and touts itself as an information infrastructure company. I assume that all means digital information and is it something we Documentum people care about then it is information management. Then it does make a lot of sense taking notes and searching the web on a laptop computer during sessions. After all we are IT-nerds Please get us some rooms with sufficient number of power outlets!

Why not even extend it further and use your own technology to integrate Tweets, Blog posts with the conference schedule so we more or less can interact live around sessions. It would even make sense for me at least to being able to register that I am attending a conference (voluntary of course) using the online profile community that alre which would make it even easier

There seem to be fewer sessions in general and especially I believe the number of developer oriented ones have become significantly fewer. I am not a coder myself so I actually think it makes sense to have sessions focused on people writing code and other with different advancement levels for us focusing on architectures, features and business cases. Another thing I noted is that there are no call for papers to EMC World the same way it works for Momentum (Europe). I think use cases from customers are an important part of the conference and it would be great to find a way to get them back in.

Please also have a look at what Word of Pie had to say about this year’s conference.

See you next year in Boston!

It will introduce a new gridless view which lists all objects as list with columns for attributs. Gridless view also can can show thumbnails at the left end of each line. There will also be a storyboard view much like the one existing in today’s Digital Asset Manager.

MWS will now have support for comments – which can interact with CenterStage comments.

Personalised Dashboard include the following views:

• QuickFlows
• Most Popular Assets
• Recently Viewed Assets
• Recently Updated Assets

To met that looks like they have starting to think in terms of Information Analytics…There is now also a feature to show the accumulative rating among users.

They see a need for customisations and an SDK or similar will be released during 2009

The Inbox allows to open a quickflow which actually was really nice-looking with attached images as thumbnails below. Looked rather similar to an email message which is the right way to go I think.

QuickSearch now supports searching on any index data.

Advanced Search has a tab called General and then for Presenation, Video, Audio and Images which allows for a higher level restriction of search.
Search on properties for instances image with a certain pixels…

There is new Presentation slide view which looks way more flexible than current PowerPoint assembly. Looks actually like viewing/reviewing slides now can be done completely without opening the application.

The view below the preview of the slides has tabs for Metadata, Versions, Rendtions, Comments, Permission Relationships

Slides can be rated and metadata can be editied just by clicking in the fields.

Video view supports thumbnails but also preview of the video utilzing FlipFactory. Looked like the previewer was using Flash.

FileSharing Services, My Documentum and Documentum for Outlook will be merged into a new MyDocumentum product and then moved into the Knowledge Worker group. Documentum Connector for InDesign & Quark Xpress are also part of My Documentum but from a Digital Asset Management side of  the house.

Many companies have 3D-data which comes from different CA-systems. Therefore they have started to develop CAD Integration with in Documentum with support of Right Hemisphere Integration (press release) which supports viewing data from 80 CAD/PLM-systems.

The solutions allows customers to request and repurpose derivatives
Flat Iron Solutions have a demonstration in the exhibition area at EMC World 2009.

Content Transformation Services
There are mainly bug fixes and some Improvements on the performance for the OEM products they are using mainly on the image side of the house.

CTS now includes support for for Adobe CS3 & CS4
There is an SDK for CTS which can be used to handle custom encoders….from my point of view the obvious question is whether or not i make sense to develop support for GIS-formats?

The next release of MWS will probably be available in September 2009.

There is available technology in the the platform to support annotations on video files but not yet exposed.

Aility to show forms in a Flex environment is something they are working on and it seems fairly important especially for us who use both TaskSpace and DAM with Forms.

VISION
The main areas which they focus on are:

Web Experience Management
Customer Comms Management (build websites based on preferences)
Customer Intelligence Management
Marketing Process Management
Brand Management include:
- Presentation
- Video
- Image
- Collateral
- 3D Image
- Agency Collaboration

MidYear
- New version of Presentation Assembly

End of Year
- MWS Pro
- Integrated Collaboration and Publsihing
- Campaign Management
- Marketiing and Web Metrics Tracking
- KPI
- Rapid and Setup of Brand

D7 – 2010
- MWS Field Editin
- SalesForce integration
- Support of Personalised Customer

MWS Pro
- Different Libraries as Tabs

Q1 2010 MWS & DAM Sp3

In preparation for the upcoming mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope there is now a unique sight at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. Space Shuttle Endeavour has been moved to 39B as a rescue vehicle if something goes wrong with Space Shuttle Atlantis during the servicing mission. It is truly a unique sight and will never been seen again since the pad is turned over the next generation rocket program at NASA and Shuttle missions will end in 2010. The sight is almost like a real version of the motion picture Armageddon which also has two shuttles on the pads, although some spaced-up future versions

Here is another great picture of them

It was very clear that the Microsoft Marketing department had a lot to say about the conference and what messages that were to be conveyed. Somewhere behind all that you could still see some of the old FAST mentality but it was really toned down. To me the conference was about convincing existing customers that MS is committed to Enterprise Search and to give Sharepoint customers some idea of what Enterprise Search is all about.

It is clear that the product line is diversifying in a common Microsoft strategy:

Solutions for Internet Business

Solutions for Business Productivity

FAST Search for Sharepoint won’t be available until Office Wave 14 (incl Sharepoint) will be released so in the meantime there will be a product called FAST ESP for Sharepoint that can be used today and will have a license migration path towards FAST Search for Sharepoint. That product will have product license of aroudn 25 000 USD and then additional Client Access License (CAL) will follow in a standrad MS manner.

So what does all of this means for us who like to see FAST ESP continue as an enterprise component in a heterogenous environment? Well, MS has commited to 10 years of support for current customers, I guess in a gesture towards those who are worried. Over and over again I heard representatives talking about how important those high-end installations on other operating systems are. The same message appeared when it came to connectors and integration with Enterprise Content Management systems like EMC Documentum. Still, most if not all demos was connected to Sharepoint and/or other MS-specific technologies.

The technical roadmap means that the past year has been devoted in rewriting their next generation search platform from Java to .Net. The first product that will be released is the Content Integration Studio (CIS) which consist of Visual Studio (I guess earlier in Eclipse) component and a server-side execution engine. This will only be available on Windows since it is deeply connected to the .Net-environment. It looks like a promising product with support for flows instead of linear pipeline to handle the processing of information before it is handed of to the index engine. CIS therefore sits in-front of FAST ESP and a combination of actions in flow and in old pipelines can be executed. Information from CIS is written to the ESP which then creates the index and also processes queries to it.

What I think we can expect is that new innovation is focused on creating a modular architecture where CIS is the first one. Features in ESP will the be gradually reengineered in a .Net-environment and thus creating a common search platform some years into the future. It will likely mean that we will still see one or two upgrades to the core ESP as we know it today to enable it to function together with the new components. Content Fusion will most likely be the next module that will extend ESP but on a .Net-architecture.

When it comes to the presentation logic where we today have the FAST Search Front-End (SFE) we will see them either as Web parts for Sharepoint or as AJAX Aerogel from MS. These are currently developed using Javascript but will include Silverlight later on.

These will initially be offered in both a IIS and a Tomcat flavour and possibly others if there is demand. They will intitially integrated with ESP and Unity and thus opening up for a new approach of developing a search experience on top of them.

I general I don’t like the Microsoft approach of insisting of owning the whole technology stack by themselves and refusing to invest in other standards-based projects. Instead of developing their own AJAX libraries they could have used ExtJS or even Google Web Toolkit. While it is not open source MS argues that it is a very Permissive licence from MS that has many of the same qualities. A good thing is that MS was comitted to make sure that this framework works on all major browsers including FireFox, Safari and Chrome. It is interoperable with JQuery.

In summary I think it is kind of a mixed experience. The new features being developed are truly needed to make FAST keep being one of the most advanced search engines available. I think many of the features look really promising and I can’t wait to get my hands on then. On the other hand it is clear that things are going proprietary (FAST ESP had a lot of open source in it), it is being aligned in a Microsoft stack and thus gradually minimizing options. That includes how new technologies are being implemented (MS-ones instead of open source), what operating systems it will run on and how the support for developing presenation logics look like. It means I have to have people how know both Java and .Net, both Flash and Silverlight (possibly JavaFx) and both ExtJS/GWT and MS AJAX/Aerogel.

We are deeply invested in the EMC Documentum Platform and would of course like to continue use ESP as a way to add advanced capabilities and performance to our architecture. However, I think I will over time get sick and tired on Microsoft sales people trying to convince me to use Sharepoint instead of Documentum. For anybody who know how both platform work it is almost a joke but I will most likely have to keep explaining and explaining. I just hope that we can have decent connector developed for Documentum.

Too read more you can go to the FAST Forward Blog which has many interviews, look at videos at the Microsoft Press Room and check out the chatter on ffc09 tagged tweets on Twitter. An finally here is what CMS Watch has to say about it.

On Tuesday at 0945 I will be speaking at the conference. My session in the Software Development Track is called “Active Knowledge Management using Documentum D6.5″. The full description looks like this:

The Swedish Armed Forces uses EMC Documentum D6.5 at the Joint Concepts Development and Experimentation Centre to develop staff procedures for a next-generation operational HQ. Based on the knowledge support concept, a customized EMC Documentum solution, using multiple user interfaces to access all kinds of digital content, has been developed.

My presentation will cover our workflow implementation using TaskSpace and BAM, our customized relationship object, graphical visualization of relationship and our integration with external search engines and GIS-systems. It will be interesting to get some reactions to our concept and how we make use of the Documentum platform. I hope for reactions not only from EMC employees but also from other big customers.

Download the full conference programme

This week meant luckily that I could stay at a hotel in Enk�ping so I did not have to drive two hours back and forth each day. Since the traditional Viking-exercise was going on at the same time in Enk�ping there where a lot of military officers from other countries staying at the hotel. I wrote about my experiences at at a previous exercise before and this time it was nothing like that at all. I could wear my nice blue uniform with a skirt which makes me feel both pretty and comfortable. I was together with a colleague more or less in control of all that happened and the experiment participants have been really nice. However, at the hotel I had somewhat of a deja vu some mornings. Maybe it was my uniform or the sounds of my heels, I don’t know but with all these mostly male officers from all over the world I felt so stared at that it became uncomfortable at times. During the evenings when we usually had some food in the bar it felt much better, maybe because I was sitting with somebody all the time. I told a friend of mine about it and he just told me that they were only looking because I was so good-looking. Hmm…I like to believe that but there is that something in people’s eyes that says something. Maybe it is because I am a female officer – I know other women in the Armed Forces have told me similar stories.

Att s�ga att jag inte �ngrar det steget �r m�nadens stora understatement. Min enda kritik av mig sj�lv �r varf�r jag v�ntade s� l�nge att ta steget

Good things
The interface have got yet another refresh but rather small modifications that I guess I won’t even notice in a couple of weeks. The biggest change is that some functions have got modal windows meaning that when you click on properties you no longer see the big full screen page but instead a new browser window that allows you to see where you where when you clicked. A great improvement I think. The import/export/check-in process also has small modal windows with a nice looking update progress bar.

A thing that I just love is the new clusters/facets features which appears when performing a search. Your results can then be drilldowned based on user, topic, date and so forth. Will improve findability hugely. We had these installed in D6 SP0 but they did not work then and seem to be connected more closely to ECI Services back then.

In general the interface is prettier and looks more distinct and modern. The icons have been slightly improved as well.
Another small improvement is that attributes which have both value assistance (dropdowns) but also allows entering of an own value now have the correct width.

I guess it is not really connected to this upgrade but I finally manage to find how one creates Presets (rules) for specific folders and users which was great. Look at the three structure in DA – not in the menu.

Bad things
The left tree structure has been cleaned up with clearer icons and the update is based on AJAX (or should see bad below). This works fine in Documentum Administrator 6.5 but for some reason they seemed to have missed something in compiling DAM because there is small refresh anyway when you click on a folder. Our partner suggest that they simply have inherited from the wrong WDK-class.

Another interesting thing is that some features that are highly marketed at EMC World are turned off by default in the configuration files. Those include Deep Export and OLE-linking support (resolving links in Office documents and imports associated files if desired). That is rather strange I think since those are really handy features. The OLE-linking can also be toggled on/off in Preferences. The effect of that is that there was no folder export available at all which is fairly strange. We also had some issues with getting import of more than two folders working.

We also have a an irritating issue around thumbnails. It seems that those can not be created for PDF-files at all which also means no storyboarding. When reading through the release notes this is noted as a known bug and it seems that despite our bug report from earlier this year nothing has been done to fix it. From a usability standpoint that is not so good.

Again, back to Centerstage I believe it will provide a lot of organisations with a client that will be a lot more intuitive and useful out of the box than we have ever seen from Documentum before. This is thanks to an ambitions usability project run by Gideon Ansell in the Documentum User experience group. However, after having had a looked at the project release matrix found in the beta community it looks like the beta of CenterStage essentials will not have enough features to be the flexible collaboration client I need. Those features will be added later on this year. We just have to wait for the full CenterStage Pro version I think. I also hope that the few missing pieces like a full fledged personal profile, expert location and integration with external presence/Instant Messaging systems will be on the schedule for the next update of it.

This week I will be able to play with the Documentum 6.5 release for the first time since it is being installed by our Documentum partners at work. I especially look forward to see the new Digital Asset Manager (DAM) 6.5 client and TaskSpace 6.5. I also hope that I can get some further information about what release of the embedded FAST InStream Search engine is used in this release.

Grateful for any clarifications or corrections if someone have found out something else.

So how do I feel about Documentum now then. To sum it up: Finally, they understand the importance of sleek, nice and usable user interfaces. I have heard many saying that Documentum is a great platform but with rather crappy user interfaces. Now that is definately going away. It was so great to see the new Magellan interface which actually addresses many of the real capabilities that modern so called Knowledge Workers need. The MediaWorkSpace application which soon will have DAM capabilities is even cooler. A lot of the design is also inspired from a great company in Cupertino, California called Apple. MediaWorkSpace almost feel like a server-based version of iPhoto sometimes. Everything is getting service oriented which is just great for the integration efforts we all have. WebTop/DAM is also getting a visual overhaul which makes them on par with what you can see in Alfresco for instance. TaskSpace is getting even cooler in 6.5 and the configuration of the interface can almost be called easy now. So Documentum is definately looking better than ever now.

What can be improved then (and here I agree with Word of Pie a lot):
- Strengthen the Documentum (CMA) community by having all of us wear the yellow tag so we know who we can talk to about these things because the 6000 storage nerds does not seem to be interested at all in software.
- Move all the sessions into one area with a soft hang-out area in between.
- Previous year they apparently had something called “Meet the speakers” and that seem like a great event.
- I would like to have more focus in the sessions on particular products so you can plan for getting updates on all the ones you are using. I would for instance have liked a designated one about the DAM client. Combined them if necessary but state explicitly which products that are covered.
- More plugs for my laptop powercord. After all this is an IT-conference I really like to take notes on my computer. Even with double batteries for my PowerBook it is hard to last from 8.30 am to 6.15 pm.
- Bigger screens. Some rooms are huge and it is real hard to read the presentations from the back.
- Why not record at least the CMA sessions on video. After all EMC is all about digital content and it could be a nice show case of the rich media capabilities.
- Case studies are better than overview sessions. Always to hear more concrete experiences from customers.

Next year it is in Orlando. Maybe I am giving a speech then

Another reflection is that conferences like this involves a lot of walking. These three days I have been walking around 5 km a day at least. Actually more than I walk a normal work day

Met Laurence from Word of Pie the other day and he has been writing excellent notes from other sessions that I recommend reading:

EMC World 2008: ECM Shared Services in the real world
Random thoughs and Keynote
EMC World 2008: Documentum Performance, Scalability, and Sizing – Part 2
EMC World 2008: Introduction to EMC�s Next-Generation Knowledge Worker Client
EMC World 2008: Web 2.0 and Interactive Content Management
EMC World 2008: Documentum Foundation Services (DFS) – Best Practices and Real World Examples
EMC World 2008: Social Computing Meets R&D
Thoughts on EMC World 2008 and the ECM Professional
EMC World 2008: Best Practices for Designing and Deploying an Enterprise Document Capture Solution
EMC World 2008: Documentum Architecture Deep Dive

Document Transformation Services (DTS) can transform
- MS Word, Excel, PPT, Project, VIsio to PDF and HTML
- PostScript (PS) to PDF
- WordPerfect to PDF and HTML

Advanced Document Transformation Services (ADTS)
- Additional formats, CAD, MSG EMC Mail, PDF/A, PDF/X output
- Merge, split, watermarks, overlays, bookmarks, hyperlinks, thumbnailing and storyboarding

Media Transformation Services (MTS)
- Transforming and analyzing graphics/illustrations, animations,
- Storyboarding of PDF and PPT
- Integration with streaming sevr
- Intelligenct presenation support
- XMP metadata round-tripping
- Today moves metadata between files in the transformation process

Audio/video Transformation Services (AVTS)
- Thumbnail
- Storyboad
- Transformation of all common video and audion
- Support for very lagre file architecture through Avalon

XML Transformation Services
- Transform XML to PDF, HTML, Compile HTML
- Support for DITA, DITAMAP, DocBook
- Provide PDF and HTML outputs for those
- Automatic pick of correct rendition for each channel

Note that renditions are below the object in the model….ACLs are on the object level but you can create new objects for each rendition and link them to the original.

Fully extensible through SDK and Java API
Admin features for CTS is available in DA

Transformations occur automatically on:
- Content import
-.Content versioning
- Life cycle state changes
- Workflow activities

It can also be triggered on demand through a transformation wizard

Automating Transformation
Invoked automatically based on format and documentum type
TIFF -> EPS
FAX -> PDF

Transformation parameters
You can hide certain paramenters
Convert to PDF
- Create to three different profiles with different selections available
Examples of settings:
- Read-only
- Allow printing
- Allow cut&paste in pdf
- Optimize for web
- Downsample

Chaining transformations so you can have parallell transformation running or having serial transformations in several steps.

Deployment Options – Architecture
One-to-many: One CTS working on several repositiories
Many-to-one: Multipole CTS working one repository
Many-to-one Tuned: Decide which components run on which server

New in 6.0
- Improved transformation UI
- Queue management
- Usage diagnostics, reporting and usage tracking (set of data we put in a table that can be pulled to a diagnostics tool – could be used in Reporting Services but nothing done so far) Choose whether or not to archive or purge the information in that table.

- Profile Editior (which creates XML-docs that can be moved between systems)

CTS Activities for BPM
- Automatic transformations from CTS

XML transformation services
- Support for any XML Transform Scenario
- DITA and DocBook support

NEW IN 6.5

Enhanced Architecture
- Real time no content sevrer queue
To provide real-time response to a transformation request
All TS available with realtime requests
Contentent may or may not be in a repository
Results can be returned to the client or place in repository
Request status available for feedback to client apps
Admin can configure when to override real-time requests with asynchronous mode
A new DFS Appserver with round-robin load-balancer, decide which nodes will support real-time
Ambition to make the load balancing algorithms pluggable.

- WS Accessibility (transform requests, profile management)
- More format support (EMCmail format, Flash video support)

- Distributed Environment Support
Content in a BOCS environment is handled. Can have CTS in branch office and then move renditions back to the central repository

- Intelligent handling of requests with content on BOC
- XML Transformations (support for export of different graphics resolution based on output channell, additional output formats in DITA Q

CTS 7

In-place transformations – large video
Flex-based UI
Link Resolution Management (OLE-support)
More format support
- Speech-to-text
- Creative Suite III, IV
- Improved CAD, including better 3D support
More Web Services
- Reporting and Admin capabilities
- Monitoring of requests
- Tape Ingest ingegration

Moving to support Photoshop and Illustrator support primarliy, possibly also InDesign-formats through Indesign Server. However, the previously open Indesign format has now gone proprietary. Working with Adobe and others to replace Adobe Graphics Server which apparently is going away.

Different areas:
- Simple to use (Any content type
- Searchable (Flexible, federatedm consolidated results)
- Collaborative (Team-oriented, extended enterprise, secure)
- Agile (available anywhere, contextual, integrated)

Presets in D6 – configuration – even more in D7
Better preferences
Saved searched improved and search templates
WebTop 6.5 in late July

She talked about features already available.
Subscribe other people to content
Preferences is persistant – no longer any cookies on the client.

Presets allows you to pick a target and set rules.
A Select a folder. Set it up to only allow certain object.-types to be created in that folder.
Only allow certain actions om certain folder.

Extended search is an optional add-on to WebTop – creates clusters.
Clusters can be created based on certain attributes.
Search templates also part of extended search – allows to make some of the values optional and some fixed.

Collaboration Environment (DCE) is now bundled with WebTop. License key still required though.
Data Tables is also available through Collaboration and 6.5 also allow attachments to data tables
Events in the calendar object can be imported through iCal exports.

D6 SP1 – OLE Link support is optionable.
That feature checks if there are linked objects and imports these documents to and create a virtual documents out of all these items. The same thing during exports.
A checkbox on the import screen to also act on linked documents.

WebTop D6.5

Email conversion to EMF-format. Converting everything to the same parent object
Conversion tools to convert all emails to subtype dm_message_archive, lightweight html-format called EMC Email Format. Email viewing tool based on HTML for viewing email and attachment without having to export.

Page Refresh Reduction – reduced as many as possible. A really good thing I think.

Modal Dialogs can be turned off. Brings up small new browser windows to see the context. Properties with its own window. Instead of the usual Documentum-screens that fills the browser window.

Multi-select Drag and Drop is supported.

HTTP or UCF Choice enhancement.

Deep Export. This is great and I can’t really understand why it took them so long.

Content Transfer Improvement (multithreaded streaming)
New import screen. Small window with green bar. No longer a white screen which is a great user interface improvement. That screen had a tendency to scare people a little bit

Security Testing has been extended. Promised no level 1 or 2:s…

Take the WDK components and pull them into a new container and give users a new UI.
The new UI of the WebTop is optional.
Looks a little like Outlook. Collapsable parts (bars) on the left.No huge tree structure any more.
The tabs I saw were:
- Search center
- Subscriptions
- Home Cabinet

User configurable home page. New column to the right for properties, versions, comments. A great improvement since it almost provides a portal page within WebTop.

Contextual right click menus.

Offline client – My Documentum Offline (OEM product) Available end of July and beginning of August.
D6 SP1 release. Free of charge for any user using WebTop.
- The My Documentum Folder (provides access to the latest versions of documents when not connected)
- Synchronize (Choose specific documents, folders, and subscriptions)
- Personalize (Tailor to suit individual needs)
- Resolve issues (Mechanism to resolve conflicts that arise during synchronization)
Offline client has a small Jet-DB on the client to hold the metadata.

Still a bit of an overlap between File Sharing Services (FSS) and Offline client though. Will most likely be merged in someway in a D7 timeframe.

Learned later on that all these new feature will be available in DAM 6.5 as well since DAM is just an extension of WebTop.

Today’s Problem: An information Explosion
The nature of content management has changed, IM, email, videos etc
Spend so much time finding things…

Who is the Knowledge Worker?
- Work in different or remote locations
- Create and work with a variety of different content
- Engage in dynamic work processes that change frequently
- Work in teams to get their job done
- Need access to managed content in their everyday application

A wide variety of interface for people to work from, spaces, wikis, powerpoint, outlook etc

KW Challenges
- Proliferation of information silos
- Work in many dispersed teams
- Finding the right information
- Seeing the relationships between types of information
- Organizing and sharing information
- Ensuring information is always accurate
- Adhering to IT-requirements for compliance and governance

IT Challenges
- Volume both in volume but also types of information
- Users are always connected – how to you do maintenance and upgrades
- Enpowerment – expect on-the-fly customization capabilities
- Control – Corporate regulatory concerns

Traditional KW Solutions
- Create silos of information
- Same info stored in multiple places
- Multiple search engines & queries
- Users re-invent wheel out of frustration
- Create solutions
- Complex interfaces are more than what users require
- No immediate access from remote locations
- Rely on yesterday’s technology (email, shared drives)

Four pillars of KW
- The Platform for Web 2.0
- Web 2.0 client
- Intelligence from information
- Access anywhere

The Platform for Web 2.0

Wikis, blogs, RSS managed as objects
Everything exposed as web services
Can be leveraged in any UI (purpose-built, partner, portal etc.)

Enterprise Scale
Built on a repository that can scale to billions
Wide array of platform services
Can interoperate with other CMA soltions like TCM
Any object can be retained, made a record, archived, published

Services-enables
Available to .Net and open environment
From a very chatty API to a less chatt SOA-based interface
Support a wide array of dispersed networks through BOCS
Extensible services for added functionality

Vision for Enterprise CM with Web 2.0
- Author & Publish (Blogger, Youtube, Wikipedia, Flickr) – Ratings on Content, IRM Security. Team Wikis, Collaboration
- Organize & Manage (Digg, del.icio.us) – Guided navigation, Tagging of items, Classification, Personalized Views
- Network & Access (LinkedIn, Facebook, Myspace, iPhones) – Enterprise Ready, Secured off-network, Mobile access, scalable infrastructure, Retention & governance

Pre-configured:
- Object models
- Taxonomies
- Business Processes
– User Experiences
- Retention Policies

BOCS Make sense for the KW Platform – ease the user experiences
BPM
Retention Policy Services
De-duplication
Archive

Web 2.0 Client

Personalized
- Simple to configure
- Include information to you
- Easy to use interface

Team thru Enterprise (Scale)
- Customizable team workspaces and templates improve efficiency
- User Management of Communities
- Ability to locate experts within an organization

Extendable
- Ability to mashup external information sources
- Components can be extended & created by partners and customers

Magellan Essentials
- No cost client
- Team workspaces
- Access control
- Library Services
- Guided navigation
- Content Templates
- Lifecycles

Full client
- Low cost client
- Wikis, Blogs & RSS
- Extranet Support
- Personal Spaces (Team Members)
- Tagging (Tag clouds)
- Federated Search
- Visualization
- Workflow

Multiple Patterns of Collaboration Supported

- Org/LOB/Deparmental
- Team & Project Oriented
- Individual (Ideation)

Information Intelligence

-Expansive Search
Both through EMC or own UI for ECIS
- Analyze & Classify (spot key concepts, detect relationships accross information assets
-Visualize (timeframe etc)

Smart Searching
- Indexing (real-time search results)
- Security (even for outside sources)
- Scalability

Tagging
- User created
- Folksonomies
- Change over time
Rule.based classification
- Metadata qualifiers
- Confidence weights
Semantics.-based classification
- Better linguistics support
- Derives the “gist” of the document
- Monitors designated information sources and provides updates
- Extracts key insights from text based on linguistics and indexing technologies

Visualization (Recommended, Indexed, Personalized, Aggregated, Guided)
- Expertise Location
- Mash-ups (google maps)
- Personalized Navigations
- Tag clouds

Work Wherever
- Offline support (synched to My Documents folder)
Use familiar tools
- MS Office, Adobe Creative Suite and beyond

Bring ECM to the desktop
- get control of email and files on the desktop
- Enforce corporate policies

Used iPod-iTunes metaphors for how the mobile client worked

A new product – platform or framework for dynamic content delivery.

The Repository consists of these components:

What about Personalized content delivery?

Three levels:

The DDS is using Site Caching Services to push content into a second XML Store and that creates a second stack (parallell to Documentum Content Server) on top of that to build highly interactive applications.

Easy to build, integrate and use. For instance interactive search forms and flexible queries

Application
- Travel Guides Destination, Interests, Price Range
- Car Owners Manual Market, Model, Extras
- Corporate Policies Geolocation, Department, Role
- Technical Pubs Market., Equipment Type, Model Number, Task

There is something called the Logic Engiine to generate guided content navigation or collection of data using dialogs to initate the next step in navigation.

The Stack in DDS:

Google Web Toolkit Client API, Web Client, Admin Web Gui, End User GUI

Web Server
- SCS Target
- GWT Server (Google Web Toolkit – mycket b�ttre �n DOJO-apps)
- JSP Tag Library (lite enklare interface �n GWT f�r att tex stoppa en Xquery i en java-app)

Delivery Platform Services

Delivery Platform API

“Apps”
- App config (generate XForms without any coding)
- XProc Engine (finally getting standardized, has an XML Schema)
- XForms (new XForms engine which executes in the client, pure Javascript component to render the forms)
- Importer (any CMS or any source, can push data to the DDS core without any programmeing through the new Site Caching Services Target)
- Logic Engine (tool that can consume a single XML-document to generate a guided UI)

Persitancy Layer:
- XML Apps
- Stored XQueries
- XForms Instances
- XProc instances

XML Store in the bottom:
- XQuery Engine
- XSL-T/XSL-FO
- Indexes
- Content

What they are trying to do is a horisontal stack which is scalable with multiple application servers.
The content in DDS is considered to be released or published content from the Documentum repository.

Want to build this using XML standards.

GUI
- XForms
- GWT
- Logic Engine (wizard interfaces)

Processing
- DOM
- XProc
- Logic Engine
- Xquery (first company with a full XQuery implementation)
- XSLT
- XSL-FO

Processing flow:
XForms Instance
Layout.xml
Properties

For instance extract proprerty-file based localization of display names of attributes. The XForms object references a label which is then found in a simple text file which holds the actual label. Multiple files like this can be created for each language.

With GWT a XQuery can be connected that drives a tree structure (as in Windows Explorer) as a web page widget. Pretty cool.

Content Server and DDS are separate installations and allows having DDS connected to a 5.3 repository.

It is deployed with WAR-files – Using a standard Application Server Container

They showed a rather cool example of a Web GUI with a couple of GWT-widgets that created a interface that using drag and drop could take different XML-chunks to create a new custom document which was instantly rendered to PDF using a template. Resulted in a nicely looking PDF (and HTML) with EMC layout while the chunks was just handled as text with headlines.

In summary a really cool way of creating personalized interactive applications. However, it isn’t always easy to make up your mind how a specific kind of content is presented and provided to the users in the best way possible. There are many interesting options to choose from using the Documentum platform and I have not been able to make up my mind on this yet.

After that I had a meeting with David LeStrat and Gideon Ansell. David is PM for the new Magellan client and Gideon works with usability issues in the Documentum product line. We met last year where we provided some info around our network visualization technologies. We presented our project and what we trying to achieve and talked about how influences from the Web 2.0 movement could be used in the Documentum platform. Personalization is important just as the personal page is to actually make the user a node in the system. The current WebTop/DAM clients offers an good interface to interact with content object but still mainly around a folder structure idea. However, there is no place to enter my personal details and my skills. Magellan will offer that and in a sense provide the first step towards a community idea. I also mentioned the need to integrate Magellan with an Instant Messaging Solution. Finally we talked a little about our aspiration to provide a GIS-oriented interface to consume objects with geocoordinates. Currently this is just a mashup based on Google Maps but we of course need a solution that works without internet access. See upcoming posts for more information about Magellan and the other new interfaces.

In this case I actually see no contradiction between folksonomies and corporate taxonomies. We want to create context our our content, right? And we most likely need users to do some part of that since they know the subject best. So we need to motivate them to provide context on top of that which the tech platform automatically can provide.

That does also mean that there is no need use in choose between either of the approaches. The just provide a metadata layer on top of the content, right? And as someone said, you have really not have too much metadata. Sometimes we will have more and sometimes less depending on a lot of factors.

Folksonomies can be analysed and used to fuel taxonomy development. And taxonomies will most likely either inspire or deterr people from certain ways of tagging.

The key is that it does not matter HOW we provide context. The payback comes when we consume it. Then all these different context layers provide us means to provide many different views of the same information. Tags will provide one, taxonomies in metadata a second and relationships between objects a second.

The more I read about this subject I think a good way to solve this is to build your infrastructure around Documentum repositories and them provide a multitude of different interfaces on top of that. Maybe in the form of wikis, blogs, search, GIS, timelines and others. The key is to store stuff the the right way. Only then can we create cool and usable interfaces for consuming it.

There were around 15-20 people present representing some of the current customers to EMC Documentum in Sweden and I looked forward to meeting other people and see how they were using the platform. However, since we only have used Documentum since May 2006 I was wondering what they would think about our approach. The unique thing about our approach is that it is not an IT-projekt, rather it a project set out to change the way we work and how to approach information management from the bottom. Documentum then becomes a tool rather than an end in itself.

The briefing went very well and I was amazed how amazed the other customers were from my presentation. Several people told me that they thought we were an inspiration in how Documentum could be used. The representative from EMC also invited me to submit a paper and briefing to the next Momentum conference in Prague. It felt really good to get that response and I was almost honored to be invited to speak at Momentum. To me that is something that other people do and now it could be me. Actually rather cool

Data deduplication should be a core feature in platforms such as EMC Documentum which put the use of this feature up on the business side of things. Since everything stored in Documentum is an object which may or may not have an attachment in the form of a document that objekt can be exposed to users in one or many folders. The key thing is that these linkages opens up for interesting ways of using data deduplication.

Imagine a corporate environment with thosands of users. A lot of important documents in the company will be used many times by many people in different contexts. Since many of them likely are used as references in different projects such as corporate strategy, marketing documents so forth they are essentially read-only. However since a lot of users need these exact documents they will be imported many times in the repository and not only taking up unneccessary space but also create problems when these documents are updated. People will ask “hey, are all of these documents I found the same version?”

So my solution would be that we have a job running on import that highlights to the user that this particular document is already available and ask the user if they want to use the existing one instead. That renders a link being created to that document in their Folder or Project space.

We can also continously run a job doing reports on the the current status of the repository to see how many duplicates we have and what kind of content is duplicated the most. Documentum Reporting Services could be used to do that for instance. If we want a proactive Knowledge Management function they can either consolidate that directly or create tasks to users asking them if they agree to deduplicate some of their content. However, we need to push hard to have someone to create a really cool and usable interface to manage these “content conflicts”.

This will further help companies manage vital documents and further reduce the confusion of which document is the correct and updated one.

From a technology stand-point the first step would be to use a simple hash function to find exact duplicates but the next step should be to use vector-based indexing technology found in both Autonomy and FAST ESP to also detect similarity levels and possibly use that for further refinement of similar content. That way we de-duplicate the same content found in different formats and have the option of removing one of them or maybe just make one the rendition of the other.

Well, it means that if a military officer see a need to collaborate around a text and they are shown a wiki they almost immediately embrace it since it does not really matter if it is a good solution. It is far better than anything they have to today. That is why I think we need to break down our needs into a basic set of tools and define what makes them differ. These tools need to be mutually exclusive:

And then you could add the spatial dimension to this. It is way different to collaborate if you are at the same place or not.

So that means that a Forum is basically a thread-based structuring of asynchronous messaging while a blog is a individually based contribution of content that can be asynchronously referenced and commented. On the other hand an application such as CoWord is doing real-time collaboration on content. The point of all this is to have some common set of references when evaluation different products and their potential use in the organisation. There is a huge difference in the way a real-time messaging tool can be used versus a tool which is asynchronous and lets you leave a message. Using a wiki in a live virtual meeting is therefore not the best solution.

A wiki on the other hand is a good example of asynchronous collaboration on content. So is most features found in enterprise content management systems such as Documentum and Alfresco.

Real-time collaborative editors have not really been a success yet even though their seem to be an obvious need for it in today’s connected world. Wikipedia has a nice article summarizing what is available today. Imaging four people working on a operation order where they each have their own cursor and writing at the same time. Science-fiction? No, try CoWord…

This toolset also gives us the chance to question product or rather protocol selections we take for granted. Take email for instance. Most people agree that we need that. The concept is familiar for many people and we know what it is used for. Or do we? Since it is basically the essence of asynchronous messaging I argue that it is exactly what we need and not email which is just one implementation of it. An implementation based on standards developed in the early 70-ies which is hopelessly out-dated when it comes to things like security and efficiency. So maybe we should require that particular kind of messaging instead and open up for other technical solutions for it rather than POP/SMTP/IMAP. This is of course particularly appropriate in closes systems which has no connections to the internet which means that “email-interoperability” is no issue.

So before we cheer at some new collaboration or social media application we should analyze them against our toolbox items and it will be much easier to find out if we like the product or maybe just some part of it.

There are more stuff in the toolbox but I will come back to them in a later post.

I am probably the only open transsexual woman working as a career officer in the Swedish Armed Forces so I know I am visible. Probably more than most people, even most women in male-dominated workplaces. Yesterday I wrote about my desire to blend in as “just another woman” and what do I think about this visibility then?

Well, first of all I guess it depends if I am visible because I am a woman or because I have a transsexual background or possibly both. I have decided to be open with my background just because I have been in a closet to long already. I believe in honesty and openness. However, it is not the first thing I say to new people when I meet them. So that is where I want to blend in and be just another woman. However, that is where my visibility as the only woman kicks in. The hard part is that I have not yet learned to figure out when people notice me because I am a woman or because “there is something unusual with me”.

Even though I am a career military officer I am passionate about IT and the possibilities it gives us. I am rather nerdy in the sense that I like to dive into the technical details of big enterprise systems such as EMC Documentum and FAST ESP to understand what makes them tick. So I guess that is unfortunately also something that is not so common among women. I hope this new website can be a place for all women (nerdy or not) in the IT-business to meet, learn, grow and get some inspiration from each other. I think that all women that work in something that is not generally seen as a typical female line of work sooner or later need to get together and compare notes from our daily experiences.

So do I like the visibility…Not necessarily but I must confess that people seem to remember who I am which usually is good Whether it is because I am a nerdy female missionary of ECM-systems or an unsual women with a transsexual background I don’t know. And in most cases I guess I have to learn not to care to much.

So like Maria I get many arched eyebrows when I tell them what I do for a living. I guess people expect me to be a hair dresser or a nurse or something. However, it does not always bother me too much since I guess I am breaking new grounds both for women but especially for those with a transsexual background.