Author: Jeff Potts

Documentum a “Leader” in Web Content Management

 Documentum is listed as a leader in META Group’s recently released METAspectrum report. The METAspectrum report is an evaluation of web content management (WCM) solutions in the North American marketplace…[CMSwire]

Includes a link to the META Group’s report that reviews these WCM vendors: Documentum, FatWire, Day, FileNet, Interwoven, Hyperwave, IBM, Merant, Microsoft, Mobius Management Systems, Percussion, Stellent, RedDot Solutions, and Vignette.

How long should it take to plan, select, and implement a CMS?

That’s one of the most frequently asked questions in any CMS project. One astute consultant, Martin White of Intranet Focus (UK), argues that project managers should plan on a 12- to 18-month journey. We might differ on the duration of some of the internal benchmarks White identifies (e.g. proposal review can happen faster, but implementations often take longer). But White is dead right on the typical overall duration. Plan your schedules accordingly… [CMSWatch]

Enterprise Software Ball and Chain

 If uncertainty in the content management marketplace is driving your firm to make “safe bets” with large, established vendors, reconsider your approach. A recent CIO Magazine article cites enterprise software vendors who — desperate to reach quarterly revenue targets — essentially abuse customers, who have no choice to buckle in the face of prohibitively high switching costs. Hardly a safe bet. The article counsels, “It’s time for CIOs to stand up to rapacious vendors,” and goes on to recommend, among other things, favoring niche software players. Major analyst firms are increasingly advising ECM buyers to rally around a single “strategic partner” for the enterprise. CIOs should look hard and examine whether what they’re really getting is a strategic ball and chain… [CMSWatch]

Global Content Management Growing, IBM Leads the Way. Gartner Dataquest released its Enterprise Content Management market share report on Wednesday. The results show that for the second year in a row IBM has been named the worldwide leader based in new license revenue, with 6 points of share over its nearest rival. According to the report, the emerging enterprise content management market is now estimated to be worth… [CMSWire]

Documentum took the third spot with OpenText and Interwoven/iManage rounding out the top five.

RedDot Announces Extended Content Management Solution (XCMS) Version 6.0. RedDot Solutions a provider of enterprise content management solutions, announced today the release of the RedDot Extended Content Management Solution (XCMS), Version 6.0. This latest version joins RedDot’s award-winning RedDot CMS product by building on the company’s philosophy of offering comprehensive software solutions that are easy to use and cost effective. RedDot XCMS 6.0 offers a single, scalable solution, tailored… [CMSWire]

Recent music acquisitions

Stone, Steel, & Bright Lights, Jay Farrar. A great live album featuring mainly stuff from Terroir Blues and Sebastopol plus two covers. It also comes with a DVD called Live at Slim’s that contains 11 live songs (including both covers).

A Ghost is Born, Wilco. I love it. What can I say that hasn’t been said by countless music critics. One of my favorite aspects of it is the harsher guitar solos spread throughout the album.

Upside Downside, Scott Miller and the Commonwealth. Scott Miller is the former frontman from the V-Roys. The V-Roys are great so I knew I’d like it. I also bought Thus Always to Tyrants. I haven’t yet listened to the latter but I like Upside Downside. Patty Griffin sings backup on a couple of tracks.

Blue Sky, Bottle Rockets. I liked it from the first track, Lucky Break. It’s about a guy who’s thankful he’s suffered an on-the-job injury because he gets to collect workers’ comp. There are a couple of tracks sung by Robert Kearns. Good songs but I prefer Brian Henneman’s distinctive vocals. Robert was not on the album 24 Hours a Day. I’m not sure when he was added to the lineup.

Next in the To Be Listened To stack are two 1998 releases from The Gourds, the new live album from Todd Snider, and the White Stripes’ White Blood Cells.

Summer Sailstice

Summer Sailstice was a lot of fun. I invited some friends to join me on the lake to celebrate the longest day of the year. We hit the water at about 10:00 or so to try to beat the heat. Unfortunately, this time of year in Texas, you aren’t going to win that battle. We were dripping with sweat before we left the slip. And, the 17-20 mph winds that had been forecasted were nowhere to be found. They were more like 0 to 7.

We had a little bit of excitement starting off. This was my first time alone in the boat with crew full of first- or second-timers. I should have taken a little more time checking the rigging before we left the dock. When I asked for the main sail to be raised, the boom goes swinging to windward detached from the mast. What made it worse was that the bolt rope on the main hadn’t been fed into the groove in the mast so the whole thing was swinging with the halyard as the pivot point. Luckily there was no wind.

I quickly realized that the downhaul had come uncleated. That allowed the boom to rise out of its groove and detach. Prior to this day, that downhaul didn’t look like it had been touched in 30 years but my Dad just threaded a new main sheet so maybe it came loose during that or maybe it just worked itself free.

In any case, no one took a boom in the face and we quickly recovered. After that we sailed a bit before heaving to and enjoying a refreshing dip. We actually did that a couple of times in between breezes. All in all, a below-average day of sailing but a great day of hanging out with friends on the boat.

Finally got my Cocoon Documentum Transformer fully functional this evening thanks to the good folks at the Cocoon Users Mailing List. My problem was that the Documentum xDQL query was returning a full XML document. When I tried to parse that, the extra startDocument and endDocument calls were causing the runtime exception (archived mailing list thread).

Now that I have my transformer working, I can configure any number of XML docs I want, each with any number of xDQL queries against any docbase my server can see. This is real handy because there are times when you want to run the same query against multiple docbases. I’ve currently got the pipeline configured to style the query results using a generic xDQL-to-HTML stylesheet, but now that I’ve got everything working, the sky is the limit. Here are some ideas…

Documentum admin portal

Go to one page and see very quickly what the status is of key metrics across all Documentum servers, docbases, and environments (Dev, QA, Prod). This is easily done using Cocoon’s aggregation of my styled query results. If I really wanted to get fancy I could use the Cocoon portal framework and create an honest-to-goodness portal with multiple users and profiles (different users might want to monitor different things on different docbases) as well as security.

But, at some point, this thing starts to approach the out-of-the-box Documentum Administrator client and I’m definitely not up for reinventing that wheel. So, this one is a lower priority.

Documentum RSS alerts

Create one or more RSS feeds that will syndicate alerts for things in the environment that need attention. To do this, I’ll add another transformation in my pipeline that will apply business logic to the query results and format “alerts” as XML. I will then add an alert-XML-to-RSS stylesheet. (I’m separating the two because I might want to format alerts in HTML). Once that is in place, I can use a news aggregator like Amphetadesk or NewsMonster to poll my Documentum RSS alerts periodically for things that need attention.

This one is nice because it does not force the admins to go to a web page–they just leave their aggregator running on their desktop.

Return Documentum Query Results in a Spreadsheet

Sometimes you’d like to be able to query multiple docbases and have the results in a spreadsheet so you can then do some analysis or whatever. Today you have to query each docbase and then cut-and-paste the results. With my transformer in place, I ought to be able to spit my query results into an Excel spreadsheet, PDF, SVG, whatever.