No, I haven’t converted into a SharePoint fanboi.  I am merely acknowledging that it is here to stay, at least for two more versions.  Realizing that, my company has been doing quite a bit of SharePoint work in the past few years.  We have recently been looking at SP2010 and just upgraded a customer to the new version.

This dalliance with SharePoint has not gone unnoticed by some people in the local area.  I was asked to co-present with Wyn Van Devanter to the Washington, DC Web Content Mavens group on what web managers need to know before making the move from 2007 to 2010.

I thought I would share my slides and offer a few additional notes for people.  For the record, Wyn tackled the first part of the presentation and I handled the second portion.  We could probably each speak to the other half, but we each presented to our strengths.

SP2010 Overview and Upgrade Planning

There were several discussions that spun out of the presentation.  I think the actual discussion was a lot more valuable than the presentation.

• Competition: There was a discussion on competition.  If you stick to the public website , there is a wide selection in the WCM/CMS market.  If you look at the Intranet usage, you are really looking at some of the newer Enterprise 2.0 players that offer a broader set of capabilities.  The legacy competition, eRoom and Lotus Notes, each have their own issues in regards to they’re being long-term players.
• Disclaimer: This is not an endorsement of SharePoint.  SharePoint is not designed for WCM.  It has a lot of requirements that drive other license revenue for Microsoft.  It has complexities and requires a Microsoft platform and .NET expertise.  That said, if you have SharePoint (MOSS) 2007, you are likely going to be on SP2010 in the near future.
• Future of SharePoint: We had a fun discussion on this.  It is my opinion that this version of SharePoint will mark the peak of SharePoint’s popularity.  The next version will likely ride on the coat tails of SP2010.  After that, I believe SharePoint will fall into the legacy category.  It is simply too big to innovate enough to maintain a lead over a long period of time.  Someone new is likely to come in and supplant them.  Of course, even with this estimate, that is some time away.
• SharePoint for WCM, Really?: Yes really.  While I have stated in the past that maybe SharePoint is not ideal for WCM, it doesn’t change the fact that people still use it for that purpose (at least the 2007 version).  They will likely continue to do so in the future as SP2010 is better suited to WCM than MOSS 2007.  The question you want to ask if someone proposes SP2010 for your website it this: What are you using for your website? Oh, and get references. Plural.

There were more, but these are the ones that I remember clearly and that aren’t covered in the slides and notes.  Feel free to drop questions.

References

These are the links from the Reference slide of the presentation.  I am providing them here for easy reference.

• Microsoft Upgrade Resource Center
• TechNet Upgrade and Migration for SharePoint Foundation 2010
• TechNet Upgrade and Migration for SharePoint Server 2010
• Websites hosted on SharePoint

Good luck.

Sharepoint 2010 has just been released and everyone is excited about the possibilities and the unique advantage it can lend to their business. Specifically, there has been a lot of talk about Sharepoint’s new web content management capabilities. A lot of folks are wondering if they could possibly use the new Sharepoint release as the technology stack to maintain both their enterprise collaboration needs and their corporate website. In this article, we will review the new Sharepoint 2010 web content management capabilities and how they may fit your organization’s strategic website objectives at this time.

Sharepoint Capabilities

Let’s begin our discussions by reviewing, at a very high level, what specific business problems Sharepoint was meant to solve.

Microsoft designed Sharepoint as a collaboration platform to address specific business needs, such as – Collaboration, Secure Portals, Data Integration, Document Management, Records Management, Search & Discovery…

Further to this, the platform offers robust APIs, which allow extension of the base platform to third party solutions that address specific business needs for corporations in the mid to enterprise markets.

Sharepoint is generally viewed in the market as an ECM (Enterprise Content Management) platform with enriched web editing capabilities. It has inbuilt support for collaboration, back office integration, secure role based access, workflows & business process automation, document indexing, search & discovery capabilities. Most of all it offers some capacity for consistent branding and layouts across the organization.

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Okay, so I'm a sucker for nostalgia. But being on the same stage as Gilda Radner and John Belushi and John Candy and Tina Fey was a thrill. And being in the same studio where Elvis Costello and the Attractions stopped "Less Than Zero" after a few bars and jumped into "Radio Radio" in defiance of NBC's wishes brought a rebellious, empowered smile to my face.

NBC's Studio 8H, home of Saturday Night Live, is where Microsoft launched SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 yesterday. It was a short, punchy, customer-filled event. These products are the latest in the "Wave 14" product set, a ginormous (as my 9-year old says) overhaul of the Office product line. And they're beauts. Here's my (admittedly enthusiastic) analysis of what Microsoft has accomplished with this product.

• The lion awakens and roars.

  Microsoft's Office business has taken a battering in the press as journalists chase stories about the important innovations from nimble startup competitors, open source alternatives, and Web-based productivity tools. But let's face it. Microsoft doesn't have 500,000,000 people using its tools for no reason. And while three years is a long time to wait for a product release (especially in this era of instant innovation via the Internet), Microsoft has re-confirmed its position as the most important driver of business productivity on the planet. This launch will crush the dreams of a 100 entrepreneurs and force another 1,000 to rethink their companies. That's okay. It's what happens when Microsoft turns a niche product for a geeky few into a global feature that anybody can use. As an economy, we need it.

• The empowerment is real.

  Categories:

  • Collaboration
  • Microsoft
  • Office 2010
  • SharePoint 2010

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The news today?  CMIS is now an official standard! I’m pretty stoked about the whole thing.  When I started this blog, after I got through my initial list of topics, it was the desire for a SOA-based standard for ECM that provided the desire.  Now that my desire has been met, almost three years later, what will I do for inspiration?

Simple, push for CMIS 2.0! In all seriousness, that is a post for another day. I want to focus on the actual release of the standard and the Demo where you can see it in action.

Stage One Complete

I’m not going to say “Mission Accomplished” for many, MANY, reasons.  I am going to say that I am pretty happy with the progress and would like to savor progress for a few days.  74 companies voted for the standard, making for 23% acceptance (15% is the minimum required).

John Newton wrote a blog post about his Irrational Exuberance on CMIS.  It is a great post for anyone with doubts to read.  I don’t think his exuberance is irrational.  While the future of CMIS is not carved in stone, I think the forward momentum is great.

• Alfresco has a supported release for CMIS, their Community Edition 3.3.  Support for the Enterprise Edition is planned for this month.
• EMC has announced that their latest early release candidate is the actual release candidate.  CMIS will be part of the core platform in their 6.7 release at the end of this year.
• Microsoft announced that the CMIS Connector for SharePoint will ship as part of the SharePoint Administrator Toolkit by the end of June 2010.  This will include using SharePoint as both a consumer and supplier of content.
• Day Software has announced their release of CRX 2.1 with full CMIS support.

Other official announcements are likely to follow quickly now that CMIS 1.0 is final.

For more information, check out the recent post AIIM 2010 CMIS article on Fierce Content Management and my 8 Things You Need to Know About CMIS article on AIIM’s Digital Landfill.

Want to See CMIS in Action?

STOP!!!  This is more than just a plug for you to play with the demo.  I am offering you a chance to download the code and play with it yourself.  You can even point to repositories that weren’t officially supported for the demo

Here is what you need:

• Object Model: This is a spreadsheet that describes the object model. This is what each vendor used.
• Source Code: This is Visual Studio 2008 project (you can try and see how it works in VisStudio 2010 trail).  All of the code is in C#.  I have removed the host servers and the authentication information from the CMISCalls.cs file, but if you look in the setConnectionInformation method, you can see where you need to go.  Note that if you want to add a sixth repository, you will need to make edits in the DefaultSearch.aspx.cs file.  If you try that and need help, leave me a comment.
• Documentum DAR File: This is the object model for the Documentum repository.  Just load it up and away you go.  You can get Developer Edition for free and then download CMIS separately.

If any of the vendors wish to make their repository that was used for the CMIS demo publicly known for everyone to use, please leave the necessary information in the comments below.

I recently dissected a “comparison” between Documentum and SharePoint. Karma was paying attention and I found myself performing a comparison of CenterStage and SharePoint for one of my long-time eRoom customers last week.

Setting the Stage

A little background.  This client has had eRoom Enterprise since 2004.  There has been some isolated success in some pockets of the organization, but not everywhere.  The initial champions left during the deployment and there was no real concerted push to use the system afterwards.  It had grown slowly over time, but hadn’t become a must-use system for many.

Recent leadership has emerged that has said that they need a system to function as the go-to collaborative platform.  After some quick thinking, they narrowed it down to SharePoint and CenterStage Pro.

CenterStage was an option because their eRoom licenses would convert cleanly, leaving them money for other items.  EMC has promised to provide a migration tool which would diminish the migration costs.  With their Content Server already at 6.5, they even have most of the platform setup and ready to go.

SharePoint is under consideration because, well, its SharePoint. People have used it and liked it.  There would be a lot more up-front costs, but if it can deliver a better solution, it might be worth it.

The Demo

I was asked to come into the office to present a demo of CenterStage to their executives.  While I did hold a slim hope for providing services down the road, regardless of their decision, I really did it because the system owner and I had been through a lot over the past six years.  As I changed companies over the years, he always called me for assistance.  I was more than willing to do this favor for him.

After setting up CenterStage on my laptop, no Internet connection at the demo location, I launched right into the demo.  I flew through the features fairly quickly.

Then the fun began.

Where are the databases/lists?  Next version this summer.  Calendars?  Soon.  Polls? Eventually. Will it still synch with my Outlook calendar?  EMC has promised functional equivalency between eRoom and CenterStage, but I couldn’t say for sure if it was in the next release.

They asked if it remembered what I was doing.  I went to a page, opened a different browser and it took me to that same page.  They asked if it worked in Firefox and Chrome.  I quickly pointed out that I had done the demos in both of those browsers.

Is it 508 Compliant? Did I mention that this is a government client?  It is not a small issue.  I know other clients that would move now if the answer was Yes.

At the end of it, they all agreed that CenterStage would work once databases were moved over.  They all agreed that they could at least wait to see what the next release held.

Next Steps for EMC

They need to release a solid update this summer.  I figure they have only a few months after SharePoint 2010′s release before all of that eRoom maintenance revenue starts to file out of the coffers.

I was chatting with a few people last year talking about CenterStage.  They said that it was too late, but I disagreed.  There was still time.  If the goal was to provide a solid interface and not directly compete with SharePoint, there was still time.

Well, that time is almost gone.  Everyday that goes by, eRoom customers leave.  SharePoint 2010 is coming out during EMC World.  Probably a coincidence because I can’t imagine they view EMC as a competitor to worry about.

Only a few minutes left on the clock.  Will EMC get it out the door?  Will it actually work or will they have to rush it to finish it in time?  That would actually be worse.

Stay tuned…

Saw a tweet today that was pretty exciting.  It was referencing a “comparison” between SharePoint and Documentum.  I was initially excited.  I’d love to see CenterStage  and SharePoint compared.  I compared SharePoint to eRoom a couple of years back and wasn’t planning on a comparison with CenterStage until the database/list functionality was ported over.

My excitement was short-lived.

I instead encountered a piece that resembles propaganda more than a fair and balanced comparison.  That may sound harsh, but I will defend the charge.

Subtle Hints

I first got an indication that there may be issues in the opening section.  This quote in particular was interesting.

[Documentum] can be viewed as a content aware RDBMS layer above the traditional data layer.

That understates Documentum’s capabilities dramatically.  The point being made in this section was that SharePoint was design from the UI to the backend and EMC has traditionally been focused on the backend to the detriment of the interface.

That is true and does help frame the conversation.  Then things fell apart.

Comparing Apples to Peas

So things start to become interesting when the next section starts to discuss business logic.  I won’t dive into the synchronous/asynchronous aspects of the BOF (it can be both), but the statement

Lately improvements in .Net and Microsoft SharePoint’s best friend K2 has begun to fully exploit the SharePoint vision

Uh, I thought this was a comparison between SharePoint and Documentum.  If SharePoint is going to bring friends, like K2 blackpoint, to the show, can’t EMC?

He then begins to belittle the Process Engine.  The term newish is patently incorrect.  It has been around for years.  I’m not saying that it is better than K2, either the blackpoint or full-featured blackpearl product, but we aren’t comparing Documentum and K2, are we?  I thought we were comparing SharePoint with Documentum.

Cloud Capability

Microsoft has the lead here.  I’ve used Documentum in the cloud, but they don’t have a commercial approach yet.  The sentence that catches my eye here was:

Microsoft on the other hand is now releasing Office/SharePoint 2010 expressly to improve (if not completely mature) the cloud model.

Really?  We are now comparing an unreleased version of SharePoint with Documentum.  Forget that there is an upcoming release and announcements scheduled for May at EMC World.

Funny side note, Microsoft has decided to release SharePoint during EMC World.  Coincidence?  Unlikely in this industry, but distinctly possible.  The Documentum related announcements could be unrelated to the Cloud.  I would say that comparing SP2010 to anything should at least wait to see where those products are at the time of the SP2010 release.

EMC keeps its cards closer to the vest than Microsoft, so rushing to any conclusions about where things will be after EMC World is premature.

Besides, I’ve used an Amazon hosted Documentum instance before.  It was a year ago for the AIIM CMIS Demo and it worked just fine.  It isn’t a technology issue, so anything could happen.

That said, does K2 work with SharePoint in the cloud?  Will it work with SharePoint 2010?  These are all gaps in the analysis that are left begging for answers.

I do love how he mentions that EMC needs to take virtualization into account.  I wonder if he forgot that EMC and VMWare are kinda tight.

Oh, and for the multi-server installation.  I can’t definitively tackle that one, but it FEELS misleading and wrong.  I just can’t prove it without more research at this time.  I don’t want to commit the same errors that I am bring the author to task.

Easy to Choose

It is easy to compare anything on just a couple of characteristics and pick a winner.  Nothing is the best at everything.

“DOS is better than any operating system today because it’s memory overhead is incredibly small.”  How many DOS deployments have you seen lately?  There are reasons for that.

This is an extreme example, but it illustrates the fallacy of the approach taken by the article.

Give me a fair and balanced review.  I don’t care who wins, just give it to me.  I’ll be doing one of SP2010 to CenterStage this summer.  I think that will be the right comparison point.

There are times when SharePoint is the right answer, and times when Documentum is the answer.  The article, as written, will not help you figure out which is which.

Disclaimer

I may be a partner of EMC, but I have more revenue coming from SharePoint projects these days than Documentum.  Documentum work isn’t slumping as much as SharePoint work is booming.