Author: Jeff Potts

One random thing from San Jose

Here’s a random thing that happened to me at KM World. I parked my rental car behind the Hotel St. Claire Tuesday night. I remember where I parked it because I noted to myself it was the exact same spot I had Monday night–a pull-through right next to a light post.

As I was walking to the lot Thursday morning after checking out of the hotel I saw a giant crane in the lot. They were working on the building next to the hotel. As I got closer I noticed that as an apparent safety precaution they had used yellow tape to cordon off a huge section of the lot surrounding the crane including the spot where my rental car was no longer parked. My car was now parked 30 feet away from its original spot, apparently unmolested.

“That’s curious,” I thought, “Who moved my car and how did they do it?” I had not given them the keys and there were no signs of it being dragged or pushed.

So I queried the attendant, to which he responded, “Maybe you left us the keys.”

“Left you the keys? I’m in the car. I have the keys. I didn’t leave you the keys.”

“Maybe you forgot where you parked it,” he proposed.

“I don’t think so, pal.” Was he toying with me or did he really not know?

People who know me will say the forgot-where-you-parked-it theory is the most likely. I’m emphatic, though. In addition to the special note I made about how lucky I was to get the same spot, the large SUV was now backed against a brick wall with little room to spare. Sorry, but I don’t have the skills to back an unfamiliar, borrowed, beast of a vehicle into a spot two inches from a solid wall.

The only possible explanation is that the crew was ready to work and they needed the space. They must have used their giant crane to rearrange the lot. It seems outlandish but I can find no other explanation. If anyone was at the conference and saw a Pontiac Montana flying through the air sometime between Tuesday night and Thursday morning I’d love to know for sure.

If it hadn’t have been a rental I would have started questioning the work crew but there seemed to be no harm done so I paid my fee, shook my head, and drove off.

Thoughts on final days of KM World and Intranets 2005

I spent the entire second day at KM World in the Content Management track (except for a quick jump over to “Intranets” to see my colleague present on Document Management Usability at Southwest Airlines).

My three favorite sessions of the day were:

Tony Byrne, “Making Sense of the CMS Vendor Landscape”. I’ve followed Tony’s blog for a while but hadn’t heard him speak until Wednesday. His session was very informative and insightful. My favorite part was the advice he was giving to people evaluating solutions. The key advice was “try it before you buy it rather than relying solely on a demo” and “the implementation team is more important than the product”. As an ECM services provider, I was particularly fond of the last point! ; )

Seth Gottlieb, “A Guide to Open Source CMS”. Seth is another blogger in my blogroll. We originally met through CM Pros. As I told Seth, his presentation did a great job covering the key players in the Open Source CMS space and comparing and contrasting the types of solutions they solve (rather than simply checking off items in a feature matrix or trying to cover a broad set of tools).

Afterwards we had a good conversation about Alfresco. I hadn’t realized they were running in a “closed community” model. I downloaded Alfresco before the trip and had every intention of playing with it on the plane but I got sucked in to a book. Hopefully I can get to it soon.

Lisa Welchman, “Lessons Learned from CM Implementations”. What I liked most about Lisa’s presentation was that she had great speaking style and an obvious passion for the subject. The content was a little too WCM-centric, but she did cite several key lessons learned which I agreed with (and, coincidentally, echoed in my session Thursday morning).

Thursday was a short day for me. I did my talk in the morning (Thanks to all who attended!), had a quick bite, and then headed for the airport.

Where are the “internal blog initiatives” case studies?

Yesterday was my first day at the KMWorld and Intranets 2005 Conference. I spent most of the day in the Collaboration track which, on this day, was focused heavily on blogs and wikis.

There were a couple of good nuggets in the presentations but I guess I was disappointed in the track overall. Or maybe what I was really disappointed in was the apparent lack of progress corporations have made incorporating internal blogs into overall Knowledge Management initiatives.

It is unfair of me to generalize that because there were no case studies from real corporations Corporate America must not be doing enough to leverage technologies like blogs, wikis, and RSS as a meaningful component of their KM program. And, there were a couple of examples given of companies, like IBM, that are doing this. But this is the KM World conference, is it not? If companies had compelling stories to tell around internal blogging initiatives where would they be presented if not here?

My company is a small services firm so our experience may not be transferrable to companies the size of our typical client. But, for what it is worth, here is an old post I wrote on why I think our internal blog initiative failed. At some point, I hope to correct these mistakes and take another run at it. Maybe by then many others will have shared their stories.

Ray’s back

Ray Ozzie hadn’t updated his blog in quite some time but I didn’t have the heart to take him out of my aggregator. This morning, I was shocked to see his blog showing as unread in my Sage window. In his new post he gives us a prelude to something new he’s been playing with.

As a matter of fact, there’s a fun little project that several of us (inside and out) have been playing with for a few months that we’ve wanted to talk about more broadly, but didn’t have a lightweight way to get it out there. Now we finally have a reasonable way to kick off the conversation. Next week, perhaps.

I’m looking forward to finding out more about this and anything else Ray wants to talk about.

Stop by at KMWorld

I’ll be at the KMWorld & Intranets conference this week in San Jose. I’m speaking on Thursday on the Southwest Airlines Intranet migration to an Enterprise Portal (Session D302, 11:30 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.).

My colleague, Patrick Dawson, will be speaking on Wednesday. His talk is on making usability a priority in document management applications (Session E201, 10:30 a.m. – 11:15 a.m.).

Drop by and say hello if you are in the neighborhood.

Google Goes after Verity Customers

Note the interesting tidbit, “…on Tuesday Google began giving away its least expensive Google corporate search product, its Mini, to new Google Enterprise customers…” I’m looking into the details. The price on the Mini has fallen to $2995 but free doesn’t seem likely.

Google Goes after Verity Customers

Of course, Google could smell blood in the water and what better way to give a boost to its customer base than to give away its cheapest appliance?

Standalone version of Documentum Eclipse plug-in

I’ve been using an older version of Documentum’s
Repository Interrogation Utility, which is an Eclipse plug-in that talks to the Documentum repository. It is real handy to be able to run DQL queries and dump objects without leaving Eclipse. But what I didn’t know is that with their latest release, they’ve included a standalone version. That means if you are working for a client where you cannot use Eclipse you can still get the benefit of the tool.