Brilliant Leap

3D Blueprinting- Will it help sell Documentum?

Suppose you could produce a tailor-made 3D digital model of the next ECM solution you architect with ease?  One that aligned workflows with requirements from a departmental perspective and illustrated how they impacted your organization's applications, strategy and processes. Big win for your customers? EMC might think so. They've expanded their relationship with Unisys which plans to use its 3D Blueprinting methodology when deploying Documentum to customers.

Documentum Jobs- How's the market?

I get at least two dozen calls a week from Documentum professionals who are neither looking to hire nor are they searching for jobs.  They simply want to know, "How's the market?"

My job, of course, is to find the market - if I didn't have jobs to fill, I'd rustle my network or make cold calls until I found them. So the market for Documentum professionals, in my world, is still pretty good, BUT that's only true if you're excellent. If you're not, sorry, but I'm not too interested in placing you. A recruiter's reputation, on a large part, is determined by the professionals and companies they represent.

And while once upon a time ago Documentum was a commodity skill, that's no longer true. I can find half a dozen mediocre, available Documentum professionals on any given day. Twelve years ago, it was hard to find people who could spell Documentum.

At AIIM- Simplicity produces challenges?

While Microsoft held its SharePoint 2008 Conference in Seattle last week, AIIM, which now calls itself the ECM Association, held its in Boston. Coincidence? I think so. But it left some wondering.

Where would you rather have been? Listening to Bill Gates, whom some apparently view as a rock star, or David Pogue, the personal technology columnist for the New York Times AND Matthew Glotzbach, Google's Director of Product Management?

Since I already posted about the SharePoint Conference 2008, here are some highlights from the speakers at AIIM. (More to come.)

Pogue told the attendees (crowd would be an overstatement- AIIM had a great program, why didn't , more people go?) that there should be a simplicity of design in computer software and hardware . Why? Because it's more efficient.  Besides, people want technology to make their lives simpler, not more complex. I agree. Most end-users don't want to think about the genius of the developer or architect who built their applications ; they're not all that interested in the PM; they just want to do their jobs and leave the office.

Are you any different? Do you think about the farmer who grew the grain for your bread when you eat a sandwich? How about the baker that baked it, or the truck that drove it to your store? You just want to eat, right? The same is true of your user.

Free, free, set them free

When I began recruiting in the Document Management space more than a dozen years ago, "document control" was a relatively common term. After attending a few Sharepoint presentations over the past year (and watching Bill Gates's keynote at the SharePoint 2008 conference on Monday via the web), "collaboration" seems to have emerged to be the word in that world.

Sharepoint, according to Gates, is "based on a vision of letting workers share information in a better way." *

Enterprise Content Management, according to Wikipedia, "is the technologies used to capture, store, preserve and deliver content and documents and content related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization's unstructured information, wherever that information exists."

On the most superficial of levels, it seems like one technology (SharePoint) is about the creation of content/documents by groups of people and the other is about storing the result(s) and keeping it safe. What happens in the "in between"? Which technology dictates the critical lifecycles and workflows? Can these technologies be used in concert to produce a winning ROI (which is somewhat jokingly referred to as "Risk of Incarceration" by traditional ECM customers.)

Documentum and SharePoint- it ain't either/or, it's a new game

Inspired in part by Johnny Gee's recent post.

There's that old saying : If you can't beat'em join'em, and I think it's safe to say that, for now, that's EMC's direction when it comes to SharePoint.

Have a listen to Chuck Hollis, he's the Vice President of Technology Alliances at EMC. (His mention of Documentum and Sharepoint is between minutes 2 and 4, if you don't want to watch the whole clip.)