Brilliant Leap

Canaries, coal mines, and please give me a reason to write something good about Documentum

Last month I went to  O'Reilly's Tools of Change (TOC) Conference in New York City to learn about how technology is changing the ways in which publishers produce content and in which the public consumes that content.. It's a big, broad subject, and I wasn't there specifically on Brilliant Leap business, but guess who I saw there? Nearly two dozen customers that EMC's Content Management & Archiving division and I have in common.

And yes, I know that vendors can't attend or sponsor every conference at which business opportunities might exist, but...as recently as last November I had attended an EMC co-hosted event “Digital Publishing and Media 2010" that was targeting the same kind but (less receptive) audience.

I found it curious.

The Documentum customers that I spoke to were still in discovery mode; they were exploring what "next steps" they might take to insure their profitability and survival (and they all involved customizing and/or digitizing content and delivering it in multiple formats). Many of them "still" use Documentum as a repository, but they didn't think that Documentum had any new capabilities that would help them move toward the future.

How about the stuff that was presented at EMC's Digital Publishing and Media 2010 event, I had to wonder. Was EMC expecting its partner HCL to show up in all the right places and do all the selling?

Why Java developers should learn Alfresco

I've got a heck of a recruiting assignment on my hands, one of my clients needs extremely bright JAVA developers to join their Enterprise Content Management solutions team. I'm talking about folks who have worked with Java 6 for the past few years, who get excited about design patterns, TreeMaps and maybe even Open Source. My client wants to train them to become Alfresco developers.

"What a great opportunity," those in the ECM space tell me.

"I'm interested," say the Documentum developers I speak to.

But my client isn't interested in most of them. "Documentum people don't know Java, they know Documentum JAVA," is what the say when I present them.

"Your client may be right," say some of the Documentum gurus I mention this to. "The API does a lot of the JAVA work for you."

So that leaves me recruiting well employed, well paid JAVA developers who have barely heard of  ECM, WCM, Alfresco, Documentum, Open Text, and explaining to them that there's an exciting future in the ECM/Alfresco space.

Now let me be clear, I'm not complaining and I'm not lazy. I get paid for identifying top talent and helping them see that my clients have better opportunities for them than their current employers. And I almost never work with a client companies who aren't growing rapidly, who don't offer attractive compensation packages, and who aren't doing exciting things.

My challenge is illustrating why a future with Alfresco  (which is an Open Source ECM technology)is brighter than sticking with just plain JAVA.

Putting Documentum WebPublisher to bed

I hadn't intended to write another post about EMC's decision to replace Documentum WCM with Fatwire's WEM (Web Experience Management), but I've gained some new insights since I wrote the original post. I also got some interesting comments that I thought were both intelligent and worth mentioning here.

First the comments:

John Kominetz wrote:

Here are my thoughts on Brilliant Leap’s latest post about EMC dropping Web Content Manager [Brilliant Leap: Na na na na, Hey hey-ey Goodbye].

I remember when Documentum turned its back on their Big Pharma customers to chase the web content management dream during the tech bubble. So now they’re backing away from WCM after dropping DCM? Hmm. Then there’s EMC’s “we’re not worthy” submissive stance regarding Sharepoint. Hmm.