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Three continents, one SharePoint story

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 08:01:00 -0400

SharePoint has been on my mind a lot recently, not least because we have been undertaking more research on the product and its usage in an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) context.

I've also had the unusual opportunity to speak to integrators, resellers and buyers on three continents over the past couple of weeks. The questions I asked may not have been scientific, or statistically meaningful, but they have at least been consistent. For example when I talked to buyers I asked:

Does your organization currently use SharePoint?
Does your organization currently use any other ECM systems?
Are you planning to replace any existing ECM systems with SharePoint?

The responses have been almost universally identical whether asked in India, Europe (the Netherlands), or the US. Almost all hands in the room go up for questions 1 & 2, and none at all go up for question 3.

Almost everyone licenses SharePoint at some level within their organization, almost everyone already uses legacy ECM systems. Almost no-one is planning replace these legacy systems with SharePoint.

Discussions with integrators and channel partners have also been consistent. The marked enthusiasm of the channel just a year back for SharePoint as a "Documentum or FileNet killer" has gone. In its place is the dawning reality that SharePoint is exceptionally good at a one thing -- group and department level document collaboration. It's not that it can't perform other services, it can - but they are not its sweet spot.

The other dimension -- which should have been abundantly clear a year ago -- is that you use SharePoint primarily for Microsoft Office documents (hence the name Microsoft Office SharePoint Services) and not for all the other content types and structures a typical enterprise encounters.

So if you remember back to the start of 2008 when we predicted that "SharePoint enters the valley of disappointment," it was a statement of some hyperbole -- and has in sense been proven at least half wrong. SharePoint buyers and users are not disappointed, they are in the main very happy when employing MOSS for sharing Office files.

Our prediction though proved to be correct though in another sense, inasmuch as the push to sell SharePoint as a replacement to ECM systems has to a large degree stopped -- a good thing for buyers, for in that direction lay serious disappointment. The fact is that buyers typically do not replace systems, be they ECM or otherwise. The growth in the data mountain and the ever changing demands to the business mean that IT adds to and attempts to enhance what is already there, rather than rip and replace. Into this reality SharePoint finds itself with a strong role to play, one that other ECM vendors have attempted in the past without success, and the Microsoft is perfectly suited for: collaboration sharing and management of Office files. It seems we underestimates the buying community, and over-credited the effectiveness of the channel marketing spiel.

CMS Watch has been accused of being anti-SharePoint in the past, yet nothing could be further from the truth. What we are is pro-informed buyer (which is why we publish the SharePoint Report!) It appears now that the channel was far more to blame for SharePoint confusion and mis-selling, at times than Microsoft itself, though Redmond's liberal use of the term ECM certainly didn't help. It also seems though that many buyers saw through the hype, and have recognized the true value of SharePoint. All I can say is, long live common sense!

CMIS - the new Lingua Franca of ECM?

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:29:00 -0400

It's often said that the great thing about industry standards is that there are so many of them. Now we have one more.

A short while ago, three of the biggest behemoths of content management (namely IBM, Microsoft, and EMC) announced a new standard... one that, if it does indeed become an accepted standard, is supposed do for the content-management world what ODBC and SQL did for the database world. (We've heard that one before, but keep reading anyway.)

The Content Management Interoperability Services specification (soon to be submitted to OASIS) is a set of protocols, exposed via REST and Web Services definitions, for platform-independent interchange of repository content. Using CMIS-defined HTTP calls, you will be able to do standard CRUD operations (create, read, update, delete) against any compliant repository, regardless of the underlying repository architecture.

Notably, CMIS leverages the Atom Publishing Protocol in its REST model (and indeed requires compliant repositories to honor APP, although they can optionally honor additional transfer representations, such as JSON). SOAP is written into the spec as well, for what that's worth.

The press releases around CMIS are loud and proud, trumpeting the spec's ability to enable platform-agnostic content mashups, easier cross-silo federation, rapid application development made possible by a common API, cleaner abstraction of content and content services from application logic, and so on.

We've heard these sorts of claims made before, of course. Proponents of the Java Content Repositories spec (originally JSR 170; now JSR 283) pushed JCR using exactly the same selling points. In fact, with just one exception, the originators of CMIS (IBM, EMC, Open Text, Oracle, SAP, Alfresco, and Microsoft) were the proponents of JCR: They were all, except for Microsoft, on the JSR 283 Expert Committee (and still are).

JCR achieved relatively little traction in the WCM and ECM worlds, though. Why should we expect CMIS to fare any better? After all, if JCR (with the same promoters as CMIS) floundered, why won't CMIS?

The answer could turn out to be quite simple. As I noted in an earlier blog, the main impediment to widespread adoption of JCR has always been the 'J': the dependency on Java. The whole world doesn't run on Java; therefore it was never realistic to think the world would embrace JCR. (Certainly Microsoft was never going to advance a Java standard.)

With CMIS (which is superficially quite similar to JCR and Apache Sling), there is no 'J' in the way. Does that mean CMIS will automatically enjoy the sort of uptake JCR never achieved? Of course not. There are many other potential obstacles to adoption, and even if the standard does gain traction, it's always possible for specific implementations to conflict in unexpected ways or be extended in nonstandard directions (as Microsoft tends to do with standards that it initially gets behind, but later hijacks or subverts in some way).

A short while before he posted his official reaction on dev.day.com, I asked JCR Spec Lead David Nuescheler (of Day Software) what he thought about the seeming collision between JCR (and Sling) and CMIS. His response was that just as the HTTP spec doesn't compete with the Java Servlet spec, JCR does not compete with CMIS. He sees no conflict. In fact, he welcomes the arrival of a high-level content protocol that transcends any one programming language. It's a net win for everybody.

I tend to agree. Here's hoping IBM, EMC, Microsoft, and the others will follow Alfresco's early lead and actually implement CMIS rather than (as they did with JCR) just issue press releases about it.

The ECM Suites Report 2009 released today

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:07:00 -0400

Today I'm proud to announce the release of the 2009 edition of The ECM Suites Report. Expanded out to over 400 pages, I believe this constitutes the most comprehensive ECM product evaluation report of its kind. In this edition we have added some new vendors, dropped some old, and revised all 30 product reviews.

This churn reflects a vibrant and extremely healthy global ECM market. As we note in today's press release, there probably has never been a better time for buyers, with a wide range of strong products to chose from, especially in the mid market.

If there is one thing in particular this latest research has shown us, it is that SharePoint did not (as many predicted) kill the ECM market, but rather the ECM market has embraced SharePoint -- and we are all the better for it.

Of course there are some stinkers out there, and as buyer you need to exercise caution, but we hope the advice, critiques, and "insider" detail we provide in this report will help mitigate your risks.

As always, if you're a subscription customer, you'll automatically receive your copy shortly.

The ECM Suites Report 2009 released today

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:07:00 -0400

As always, if you're a subscription customer, you'll automatically receive your copy shortly.

SAP looks to India for ECM?

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:23:00 -0400

Is SAP slowly moving into the ECM space? It's a question that has been asked so many times over the years that it has become something of a "chestnut," as we say in England. For if you are ever at a loss as to what to chat about with people in the ECM industry, SAP is a surefire conversation starter.

SAP was (allegedly) going to buy Open Text on many occasions, but as of today still have not. They were (allegedly) shocked when Open Text bought iXos ( a firm that focused almost exclusively on providing content and archiving software for SAP), but did nothing about it. They were (allegedly) going to buy German vendor Saperion, but didn't. Once Oracle moved in to the ECM space with their acquisition of Stellent, fine ECM minds asserted that SAP would be forced to respond, but they didn't.

But now SAP does appear to be doing something: they are considering buying a 15% stake in Indian ECM vendor NewGen. Could this be a prelude to a full acquisition? Well it could be and it wouldn't be a bad choice, though it may take Euro- and US-centric observers by surprise. At CMS Watch we always try to take a very global view of things and have been following NewGen since the birth of the ECM Suites Report. It's a product that would potentially be a good fit for SAP -- and one that could likely compete well against the likes of IBM and Oracle with the marketing and sales push that SAP could give it.

But who knows...a 15% stake sounds a lot, but to SAP 15% of NewGen is small change. (SAP's venture arm has also invested in search vendor Endeca and open source ECM supplier Alfresco.) What we do know is that it keeps the rumor mill busy - and reminds us that from the outside SAP may appear to doing nothing in the ECM space, but they clearly are aware of ECM, and they probably do have plans for the future, even if they haven't shared them yet.

As a buyer of an ECM system to handle content and archiving loads from SAP, it's not as if you are short of options; almost every major ECM vendor can provide relatively out of the box integrations with SAP, and some even have dedicated groups to support such integrations. So an entry by SAP into the ECM market will likely not present a sea change for buyers, but it will certainly be interesting fodder for industry observers.

Web UI development: inherently slow?

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 18:49:00 -0400

In a thoughtful post at JavaLobby, developer Ali Loghmani poses a simple but important question: Why is Web UI development so slow?

Here, Loghmani is not just talking about the creation and placement of AJAX widgets on web pages. He is talking about full-cycle development and testing of web and portlet interfaces that integrate with popular MVC webapp frameworks such as Grails, Django, Tapestry, or any of a slew of others.

The reason this is an important question, of course, is that people write custom web and intranet apps against their DAM, WCM, ECM, and Portal systems all the time, whether for public-facing B2C apps or just to create a CMS front-end that content contributors will actually use. And it is invariably a resource-intensive process. Gobs of time, money, and engineering talent go into the creation of web interfaces (and the code that binds those interfaces to back-end business logic).

Loghmani laments the protracted program-test-debug time in development frameworks that require (as many do) redeployment of files to an appserver before changes can be previewed. This is certainly a problem. It's one thing to do an eye-pleasing mockup of an AJAX webform in a browser; quite another to wire it into JSF and do full-cycle debugging in WebSphere, say, or JBoss (or whatever).

There's also the perennial cross-browser compatibility bugaboo. Web UIs tend (still) to perform differently in different browsers, necessitating ugly "browser-check" code with parallel logic branches to handle the various browser types and their legacy quirks. Writing and testing this kind of code takes time.

Of course, to some degree UI development is an inherently hard problem. The mapping of widget states to program states is not always straightforward. To the contrary, the possible permutations are more often than not incalculable, and the potential side-effects legion. You can't expect this kind of programming to go quickly.

In the end, Loghmani argues that the sheer complexity of popular MVC frameworks is a major (perhaps the major) contributor to long UI development times. As much as I value simplicity, I have to disagree here. In my experience, complexity is not a bad thing per se if you can properly hide it. Twenty years ago, three-person crews were the norm on airliners. Today it's almost entirely two-person crews. Ironically, the airplanes have gotten much more complex, but the human interface has been refined to the point where you no longer need a "flight engineer." This is an example of how complexity can be hidden, to good effect.

I think one could argue that the main reason Web UI development is slow is because insufficient tooling exists to make it quick and easy. Things like Tapestry and JSF (and appservers) are complex, with many moving parts. Developers are constantly having to open the hood and make hand adjustments to rather intricate machinery, using only basic hand-tools.

In the post-2.0 world, that won't do. Time is too precious. We're going to need better tools -- or perhaps an entirely new development paradigm. Old-school MVC development, à la Struts and all the rest, is just not cost-effective any more. If indeed it ever was.

Talking about Social Software

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:04:00 -0400

I recently had a long and wide-ranging interview with IT Business Edge on the topic of Social Software technologies.

The intrepid reporter, Ann All, transcribed nearly the whole discussion verbatim -- a rarity these days! -- and something any analyst (well, at least this analyst) welcomes only with some trepidation, because you're never (I'm not) as articulate in a stream-of-consciousness chat than a well-considered article. For example, I was more harsh on SharePoint in the end than I intended to be. Anyway, the key points come through and I'm not complaining.

Ann also offers some interesting commentary here.

Look for more from us over the coming months on the topic of Social Software, in these pages and others...

How Fast is Attivio?

bloem@radagio.com(Adriaan Bloem) — Sat, 5 Jul 2008 09:55:00 -0400

The Fast Search & Transfer news continues to keep me on my toes. The Norwegian business weekly Dagens Næringsliv seems to have come up with some decent evidence (English translation) of many things everybody already suspected -- and a couple of new ones.

It covers the Convera acquisition and the "separate" but surprisingly coincidental deal where Convera bought several million's worth of Fast software it didn't need. Or as rival Autonomy (which was also in the running for buying Convera) has pointed out, Fast pumped up its revenues for that quarter with part of the money it paid for Convera, then got back for licenses. The DN article also covers a few other very suspicious deals, and some outright fraud. It's now even getting to the point where calling Fast "the Enron of Norway" is getting long in the tooth.

While that train wreck was unfolding before my eyes in slow motion, my fellow analyst Theresa Regli pinged me last February about a new enterprise search company called Attivio. Information Today raved about their new product AIE, with analysts quoted as saying things like "they are moving rapidly to develop tools that will eliminate many of the practical barriers to easily and efficiently deploy robust enterprise search solutions," with the unique selling point of "data integration plus search and content processing," a "hot niche for the next few years."

Since I'm always interested to find out more about robust enterprise search tools to fill hot niches for the next few years, I scrolled down to read what the Attivio CTO would explain about how the product would achieve what "should have been solved by the integration of text search and XML into relational database managers such as Oracle." As it turns out, it is based on a "mash-up" of open source Apache Lucene and "licensed commercial software."

As described in our Enterprise Search Report and on this blog, Lucene itself is just a Java text search API. To be able to actually gather, convert, and query content you need many more components. It is perfectly feasible to put together a working enterprise search product around the core Lucene JAR (as demonstrated by IBM's Omnifind Yahoo! Edition). But in order to get there, and to have Lucene index, for instance, Office documents and PDFs, you will have to first convert those documents to text. The filters to perform that conversion can be bought from other vendors, based on open source such as pdftohtml, or you'll have to build them yourself, which is a lot of work. There aren't too many vendors building their own filters, or even just modifying open source to do so. So if you do build the filters needed to use Lucene yourself, you'd probably like to mention this as an advantage, and as Attivio states, "we developed our own Microsoft Office, WordPerfect, and PDF connectors to improve performance and reach deeper into the files than the conventional converters."

Since, like most enterprise search products, Lucene isn't based on a database and couldn't even connect to such content without help, it isn't surprising Attivio had to develop a "unique RDBMS data loader" which "indexes the tables individually." This, again, is presented as a major advantage -- remember, converting documents and integrating structured and unstructured data are "a hot niche."

I remember seeing a vendor at a conference a few years back, with banners jokingly stating its product was "buzzword compliant!" Attivio certainly seems to have that skill down. The engineering effort is marketed as a "technology mashup," "breaking down silos" between "open source and commercial software." "We have lived with the challenge of having to choose between the precision of databases and the richness of search for a long time, but no longer" sounds great, but I don't see Oracle and Thunderstone's RDBMS-based solutions breaking out in a sweat just yet.

Maybe my over-exposure to marketing materials and flashy demos has turned me into a cynic, and Attivio's downloadable trial version will have to do at least a decent job to convince me of the product's added value. Fortunately, that free download is "coming soon!" Yes, I'm sorry, I'm finding it increasingly hard to turn off that cynicism, especially when I turn back to the DN article about Fast Search & Transfer. Attivio was founded by former Fast employees and the Attivio CTO is Sid Probstein, formerly vice president of technology at FAST. More importantly, Attivio's CEO is Ali Riaz, who was COO at Fast but unexpectedly left the company in late 2006. Well, in hindsight, perhaps not so unexpectedly, though DN quotes him as saying "I had nothing to gain from manipulation of the accounts. I had no shares in the company. I wanted shares and quit because I didn't get any. If you want to find out what's wrong with the accounts, you need to look at those who could gain from it. And it wasn't me."

Dagens Næringsliv doesn't appear to agree with Riaz, however; if you want the full analysis of the what and why, I suggest you read the article. I myself find it surprising that the CEO of a technology startup backed by $6.2 million in venture capital would drive an Audi R8, but that doesn't mean anything (other than that I'm envious of his car). I also find it surprising a former Fast COO would be co-owner of a company reselling Fast licenses, but walking like an Enron duck and quacking like an Enron duck doesn't necessarily mean that it's really anything like Enron. And Attivio's clouding the core technology in marketing hyperboles and buzzword compliance is slightly disconcerting, but many renowned companies engage in the same practice.

DN quotes Riaz as saying "you should be much better at praising the people who have success, instead of pushing them down." And I would certainly love to be proven wrong by Attivio's software; as soon as I get my hands on the trial download I requested, I will let you know if it lives up to the high expectations. As one of my teachers in school once told me, "I'm known for being cynical, or even sarcastic -- myself, I prefer to call it healthy skepticism and mild irony."

Being a cynic isn't a lot of fun -- but for now, I would advise you to be at least healthily skeptical of what Attivio has to offer.

ECM buying tips from the experts

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:35:00 -0400

This past week I had the pleasure of keynoting at the DocTrain event in Indianapolis (held at the truly magnificent Union Station venue), and also running a small session on "How to procure Content Technologies." I have been running these small sessions for a long while now and they tend to prove very popular, and though I have been doing this for years, there are always new tricks to be added to the bag.

At the end of this particular session I chatted with the head of a leading US ECM integrator (who wishes for good reason to remain anonymous!) who said he liked the session but would have added two key points.

Never buy at the end of a quarter

Avoid ELA's (Enterprise License Agreements)

And he is quite right -- and anyone who attends these sessions in future will be sure to be reminded of these key lessons.

First, when it gets close to the end of the quarter, vendors sales staff are desperate to boost and close any outstanding deals. Theoretically this puts you the buyer into a strong position. Theoretically you have maximum leverage. But theory is not the same as practice. Just as I would not go into the ring against Mike Tyson, you should likewise recognize that against an experienced account executive from EMC, IBM, Oracle, or any other ECM vendor, you are way out of your league. The great deal you negotiate -- for example the 300 extra seats you got for the price of 150 -- may not seem such a bargain in the long term. When prices drop, the next major upgrade is announced or you simply find them sitting on the shelf racking up maintenance costs. Buy what you need, no more, and stay away from Account Execs when they are trying to close out the quarter.

Likewise my friend makes a very good point about ELA's (particularly popular in large ECM and Archiving deals). These license schemes have been driven in part by the demand of large enterprise who in the past have bought modular licenses and found themselves stiffed when they need yet more modules at every turn. "Oh no madam, you don't have workflow as part of that deal....or frankly anything you need to make that system I bought you operable, you will have to buy more appropriate licenses from me." ELAs seem to make a great deal of sense, since you get everything for a single price.

But they bite in two unexpected ways. One, the ELA almost certainly excludes some vital component that you will only find in the fine print once it's too late. Secondly and potentially more serious: once you have signed an ELA, no matter how big the deal, you are no longer of any interest to the vendor sales team, who have moved on to the next client. I can personally attest to watching a deal worth over $20 Million US get signed -- and watching the account exec leaving the building within 30 minutes, even though they were scheduled to remain for the next two days. Once you have signed an ELA you have lost any and all leverage with the vendor. Think hard about whether you want to be in that situation...

JSR 286: The last portlet standard?

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:46:00 -0400

The final release of the updated portlet specification, JSR 286, which came out earlier this month, marked the end of a long process for the important (Java) portal standard.

As a follow-up to the widely-adopted JSR 168, this portlet specification 2.0 moves to make portals more like integrated apps and less like collections of disconnected windows. Specifically it adds support for events, public render parameters, resource serving, and a portlet filter.

Some vendors like eXo, IBM, JBoss and Liferay have already been supporting earlier iterations of the standard and two years ago, I commented that most commercial portal vendors are behind this new portlet standard. While this is still the case, many significant changes have happened in the marketplace since the initial draft of JSR 286 in August 2006.

Jason E. Shao from the CampusEAI Consortium asks in a blog whether the next generation portlet specification really matters and over at the TheServerSide.COM you can find a healthy discussion on the final spec release.

Standards generally go missing in this marketplace, but judging from the very limited attention this new version of the portlet spec has received, it makes me wonder whether the marketplace has already left the need for it in the dust. As a buyer the new industry standard might seem the preferred option over the many proprietary implementations that build on the shortcomings of JSR 168, but make sure to study the emerging implementations of the new standard carefully to avoid an early mover disadvantage.

More ECM acquisitions for Oracle

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:00:00 -0400

Oracle keeps moving down ECM trail with two new acquisitions to add to their growing portfolio. Both Skywire and AdminServer are specialist vendors who have developed niche offerings for the Insurance and general Financial Services sectors. Oracle have already seen some success in Insurance, but the acquired technology -- and just as importantly the domain expertise -- gives Oracle a bit more heft against EMC and IBM.

Of the two acquisitions, the Skywire one is the more interesting. Skywire provides multichannel, component-level publishing software. Though currently selling mainly into the Insurance sector, under Oracle's ownership this could expand into the much broader CCM marketplace.

As with any acquisition, the devil is in the detail. Oracle appears to have bought a couple of strong offerings, but integrating such small niche firms into the huge mass of Oracle is will be a challenge, as will porting the software into the UCM and Fusion stack. As always it will take some time before things settle and we really see how this will all work in practice, and as always you can rest assure we will continue to evaluate the progress in detail in our ECM Suites Report.

Announcing the Enterprise Social Software Report 2008

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The full name is actually Enterprise Social Software Report 2008: Networking & Collaboration Within and Beyond the Enterprise. Enterprises are increasingly using social tools -- some new, some not so new -- within and beyond enterprise boundaries. As one side effect, those boundaries are increasingly blurring, even though vendors still find it difficult to satisfy both internal and external scenarios.

The report evaluates 20 Social Software vendors against eleven common scenarions, weighing in at about 400 pages. Turns out there are a lot of differences among vendors and approaches. The tools may espouse a light touch, but many of the architectures are far from trivial. Our media release today highlights just one potential challenge you may face implementing at an enterprise level: the general dearth of system services (like configuration management) across this space.

The report is available for pre-order today. Subscribers will receive their copy in a week or so when the official version gets burned out.

IBM-Microsoft shoot-out at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Mon, 9 Jun 2008 19:06:00 -0400

This morning at the Enterprise 2.0 conference we were treated to a series of semi-structured Social Software demos pitting IBM (Connections) against Microsoft (SharePoint), all moderated by Mike Gotta of the Burton Group.

Interestingly, both vendors pushed the portal angle: IBM bringing WebSphere Portal Server into play (partly as a container to mix in its quite separate collaboration tool, Quickr) and Microsoft showing off various 3rd-party Web Parts that can compensate for the dearth of native Social Networking services in Sharepoint.

IBM came off looking better for various reasons. They fielded a more focused demo team -- never to be underestimated -- but also because Connections has some slick, Ajax interfaces, and SharePoint does not. Ajax does not necessarily bring better usability, but done right, it can simplify complex interfaces.

And believe me: most Social Software tools ship with busy, power-user interfaces -- the sort of complex dashboards that have induced vertigo among enterprise portal users for years now. Social Software vendors seem to assume that all adopters are information addicts, wanting to scan multi-column pages packed with small-point text and hundreds of links to related, or popular, or recommended information. For some, surely that's true, but what about the mass of your colleagues? Asked one participant, "Are there documented best practices to implement [Lotus] Connections without overwhelming the community?"

IBM also previewed a selection of alphaware, including a social network analysis module and feed reader that will darken the marketplace "some time this year." SharePoint in contrast, came off as quite boring, and in the "back-channel" chat room a lonely, dogged Redmond representative got tortured by attendees. There's a palpable anti-Microsoft vibe among consultants here -- as you would suspect at any "cool" conference -- but I wonder if that's partly just resentment. Many of the enterprise attendees I spoke to are at least experimenting with SharePoint before going out into the marketplace to select another tool. Whatever its (many) demerits as a Social Software platform, SharePoint feels simple. IBM's Connections product made a good show for itself, but as we'll highlight in the Enterprise Social Software Report 2008, the attendant infrastructure requirements are not trivial.

High Stakes for Documentum

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Wed, 28 May 2008 20:47:00 -0400

CMS Watch principal Alan Pelz-Sharpe headed to Vegas last week to participate in the annual EMC World show. Amid partying storage sales guys and dazed content management developers he witnessed a Documentum product line-up getting increasingly eclipsed by other EMC offerings. For EMC it's a reasonable bet, but for Documentum software customers, the stakes are high indeed...

Enterprise search: free as in free beer?

bloem@radagio.com(Adriaan Bloem) — Fri, 16 May 2008 13:23:00 -0400

Searching information -- really, how hard can it be? So, why wouldn't you go out and get a search engine that's for free? Well, to stick to the analogy of "free beer," you might wake up in the morning with a headache, only to find your wallet gone.

Of course, I'm paraphrasing the definition of "free software". Richard Stallman's example is used to point out the ambiguity of the term "free" in the English language. With free software, "you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer." Nevertheless, you should be warned: both open source beer (now in version 3.3) and free commercial beer have the potential for leaving you with a bit of a hangover.

If you really think enterprise search is a simple commodity -- and I will only comment on that with the obligatory statement that readers of our Enterprise Search Report will probably know better than that -- getting a free product would be ideal to get your feet wet (albeit somewhat sticky). I get invited to BYOB enterprise search parties a lot, and usually come up with Apache Lucene, IBM Omnifind Yahoo! Edition, and Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express. Let's get a closer taste of each.

Apache Lucene. Lucene is open source, which you are free to use. The problem is, it's not a complete enterprise search product -- it's a "text search engine API." What you get is a Java JAR with the core functionality of a search engine. In typical hardcore Java developer understatement this is described as "you write the easy stuff, the UI and the process of selecting and parsing your data files to pump them into the search engine, yourself." To developers that doesn't sound too difficult -- it's a library they'd be able to use to create search functionality for many applications. As they embark on that journey, however, many will find out they'll have to become experts on enterprise search to get their implementation to perform basic tasks any Google user has come to expect. Index Word documents? You'll have to convert those to text first. Remove stop words or perform spell checking? You'll have to get some more jars to fit that in. And that familiar user interface isn't so easy to replicate, either.

Of course, there's a couple of more "pre-packaged," Lucene-based engines (such as Nutch and Solr), but they'll only take you so far on that long and winding road. There's some excellent examples of what you can achieve with Lucene, but many more of how hard it can be to get there.

IBM Omnifind Yahoo! Edition (or OY!E). The Google appliances have the Google brand behind them, which must have got the IBM people thinking the Yahoo! brand would be excellent marketing for their free-to-use search engine. In fact, it's neither IBM nor Yahoo's technology, but Lucene wrapped in other open source software. A few commercial bits thrown in create a product that's easy to install and run. It will actually do many of the things Lucene will make you work hard to accomplish: it comes with support for several languages and quite a few source content filters. For users, it looks like a regular web search engine; for admins, there's a nicely designed and intelligible interface. In short, it does most of the things a Google Mini appliance will do -- but for free.

So what's the catch? Well, the license (by the way, what license?) limits you to 500,000 documents and 5 collections. After that, you can "upgrade" to other Omnifind products. But since the technology across the Omnifind line-up is completely different, this is the same as starting from scratch, and you'll pay for the privilege. I've been critical of the limitations of Google's appliances in the past, and sure, the 50,000 document limit of the entry-level Google Mini is a lot less than OY!E's half a million. But that comparison isn't really fair, considering the fact the Mini actually comes with the hardware to run the queries on for a mere $2,990. And don't think you'll be able to run IBM's software on an old abandoned test server you have available -- OY!E will need more power than the single blade Google Mini or Thunderstone Appliance to match the performance. Tellingly, I wasn't able to dig up an example of an OY!E implementation to mention while researching the Enterprise Search Report (if you know of one, let me know).

Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express. Microsoft's free offering is basically the same software as the non-Express version, but then there's the seemingly innocent limitation: one server only. I wouldn't want to continue the theme of this post by saying this is akin to handing out free samples of beer to get you hooked; suffice it to say that if you start to run the Express version in a production environment, there will, no doubt, come a time when a single server won't be enough anymore. When you've come to rely on the solution, you'll suddenly have to shell out for the licenses. As I've said before, having a free lunch isn't necessarily a bad thing; just remember that you'll probably have to pay for the beer the lunch comes with.

So, this might all start sounding like advice your mother gave you: never take anything from a stranger, and certainly no free alcoholic beverages. Don't forget, however, that I'm Dutch, and I've certainly developed a taste for enterprise search. Free beer sounds too good to be true, but it could certainly get your party started; just remember to drink in moderation, and never, ever, drink and drive.

Announcing The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Wed, 7 May 2008 08:34:00 -0400

I'm thrilled to announce the launch of The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008. While we've followed DAM and blogged quite a bit about DAM and MAM (Media Asset Management) over our 7-year history, this report represents our first comprehensive comparative evaluation of 18 DAM tools, and our first aggregation of DAM and MAM best practices.

Subscribers, you'll be getting your copy shortly; others can download a free sample here.

For several evaluations of major enterprise DAM vendors (Open Text's Artesia, Interwoven's MediaBin, EMC's Documentum Digital Asset Manager, and the IBM FileNet / Ancept Media Server pairing), we built on the foundational DAM research in our ECM Suites Report 2008. We then looked at several pure-play DAM vendors, including ClearStory, North Plains, Canto, WAVE, Widen, and ADAM. You can see the full list of vendors covered here.

As always, the core of our research centers on talking with customers, the real everyday users of DAM systems. Our goal is to cut through the marketing hype and report people's real-world experience with the tools, and help you, the buyer and implementer, understand which tools are most appropriate for which situations. As with all the technologies we cover, the DAM industry has seen many failed or abandoned investments because of poor product selection or implementation practices. We want you to go into your product selection and implementation with full knowledge of a product's strengths and weaknesses.

My fellow DAM analyst Kas Thomas and I will blog a lot more about DAM and MAM in the coming months. We both had a great time putting this report together, as it's a rather fun and sexy technology. We also hope to see you at the Henry Stewart DAM Symposium in New York City next week; my Wednesday tutorial, "Sorting Out the Content Technology Marketplace," will present an overview of this new research, along with some of our latest ECM and WCM findings, as well.