Brilliant Leap

A Friction-less Future?

I'm interrupting my three-part series on Transactional Content Management EMC-style because of a particular word: FRICTION. Although I don't want to go on record saying it was used in every keynote at EMC World, not a keynote speaker I listened to failed to say it......

What's Up with Captiva?

Most of us in the Documentum world don't spend too much time thinking about Captiva. "It's Input Accel re-branded," is how one Documentum developer describes it. Another calls it, "Document Management .5. It's what companies used to scan paper in, stuff that wasn't created electronically." And that definition is good enough for a woman I interviewed six months ago; she got sick while searching through paper-based clinical study archives. "This stuff needs to be in the computer, not where it gets moldy," she says.

But EMC and Wikipedia see Captiva as something more than a tool that scans, stores and catalogs documents originally recorded on paper, electronically. Its larger value-add is......

Get Webcited!

I've received a number of e-mails from folks who are not at EMC World asking "What exactly is Magellan about? Will it interface with MySpace or Facebook? Will it be integrated with WordPress for blogging? I even heard something about iPhone...

It's finally here and it's...

Documentum's first Web 2.0 product. Initially it will be made up of ESSENTIALS for collaboration and guess what the price will be ( if you're an existing Documentum customer)?

Live from EMC World

For anyone who hasn't been to EMC World before, it's huge , especially compared to Momentum.

And when it comes to size... paste whatever attribute and meta tag (spell check insists it's two words) you want on to it, it matters.

So being the rebel I am, instead of my usual long posts, I'm going to write small, short, posts on the different aspects of what I have seen and experienced.

Documentum Partners- Wake-up!!!

I was searching for something on the web today and noticed that the Wikipedia entry for Documentum references Impact Info Systems as an external link.

 

External Links

• http://www.software.emc.com

• (Doogle - popular meta-search engine of Documentum related contents)

http://www.impactinfosys.com

 

An Antidote to SharePoint Gone Viral

I admit it. When I first saw SharePoint demo'ed at an ECM Conference, I turned to the Documentum-loving architects sitting on either side of me and said, "Wow! These screens are so much friendlier than Documentum's."

By "friendlier," I meant that they looked like WINDOWS.

My conference-mates gave me a dirty look. They hate most things Microsoft. I suspect that their reasons have less to do with user-experience than with the fact that Microsoft's architecture is so closed.  I challenged them on this when we went to lunch, after all, does a user care if something is open source or proprietary?

Time to diversify?

Sometimes I'm asked to answer the same question as a stockbroker; people call and ask, "How's the (ECM) market?"

No one is actually looking for scientific data, they just want to know I'm hearing. I talk to a few hundred ECM professionals each week, so it's fair to say my ear is pretty close to the ground, in the USA, anyway.

And what I'm observing is that companies are re-thinking their ECM strategies for a number of reasons: Regulatory (FDA, ISA, SOX etc...), Business/IT Strategy (SOA, SaaS, Enterprise 2.0), Storage (Scanning, Archiving and Access), Cost, Ease of Use, and the availability of newer technologies ( SharePoint, Alfresco).

The (ECM) market, as a whole, seems to be growing, but the old mainstays (DOCUMENTUM, FileNet, OpenText) are no longer the default response. 

Does this mean that Documentum is losing market-share? someone recently asked. It's hard to answer that question without any real statistics on hand. 

We do know that EMC is enjoying record revenue growth, but what about Documentum? EMC's report doesn't reveal product-specific statistics.