Here are my
AppGap posts for August. I am also writing in another Corante blog, FastForward
(see right side bar for links), The AppGap posts began toward the end of
January 2008.  Here, I am primarily
doing product commentaries with a few other things thrown in. Below are the
ones for August. There will be more in September.

I began to think what a deed I’d done.
I grabbed my hat and I began to run.
I made a god run but I ran too slow;
They overtook me down in Jericho
- IN SEARCH OF LITTLE SADIE

Lordy, has it been a year already? Sure has. The 2010 Gartner Magic Quadrant for WCM is out. You can get the report here courtesy of our friends at SiteCore. As usual it is worth a read, but here is the juicy bit:

I’ve marked the guys that have improved a reasonable amount with a green line, indicating where they’ve moved to since 2009. No-one has really slipped, although a few have vanished. EMC have given up on WCM and are partnering with Fatwire instead. Vignette and Nstein are also now part of the Open Text dot. Expect to see Day replaced by Adobe on here in 2011.

They’ve stuck with the same Big Three (Oracle, Automony/Interwoven and Open Text) in the lead as last time. Two other Big Guys – Microsoft and IBM – are inching closer to the Leader Quadrant. It does seem that to be near the top of the “ability to execute” axis, you need to be a massive company and have technology that is at least ten years old. I ranted about this last year, and the same thoughts apply. I should point out that this dimension is defined as “how well a vendor sells and supports its WCM products and services“, not on the success of implementations or happiness of customers. If you want to get the products with the most marketing dollars behind them, this is the axis for you.

The Open Text logic still confounds me. Here is how I see it. In 2009, Open Text was one of the three leaders, based on what I can only assume was The Product Formerly Known As RedDot. Vignette and Nstein were lingering in the shitty quadrant (VIGN on the border, admittedly). So my only conclusion is that RedDot was the favoured product in the eyes of Gartner. However, my spider senses (and OTEX staff layoffs) tell me RedDot is on its way out and the Vignette WCM product is the Chosen One. So I’d have expected the Gartner folk to move OTEX further into the danger zone, but the uncertainly and product direction have actually given them a boost.

The tussle between the younger upstarts is as close as ever. The Java vendors (FatWire and Day) have gained slightly on the .NET ones (SiteCore, Ektron). The Java/.NET hybrid, SDL, keeps its nose in front. I think we’ll see bigger gaps in 2011.

Last year, I noted that poor EPiServer had got a bit of a raw deal. That’s been fixed. I’ve always felt they should be sitting right next to SiteCore on this thing. And CoreMedia also got a big bonus. Alterian got a little boost, but they’re still in the quadrant of despair.

There are two new vendors on there, Atex and Dynamicweb. I’ve heard of the latter but never seen them. And only heard of Atex when they aquired Polopoly as few years ago. Never seen their product either, so not comments here.

Still no Open Source vendors on here, for the same revenue related reasons as last time. I’m not going over all that again.

Most of these little yellow dots haven’t drifted very far in a year – the report is pretty similar despite the M&A activity that has kept us bloggers busy. So pretty much a repeat of last year. And, like last year, here is hoping Gartner’s lawyers don’t serve me any takedown notices.

The new Premier League season is upon us in England and it was with some surprise that I noted Tottenham were being sponsored by Autonomy, purveyors of Bayesian probability and content management systems.
Professional integrity dictates that I shouldn’t exclude Autonomy from shortlists just because of who they sponsor, but this deal may cause those of you with taste to reconsider whether Autonomy are meeting their corporate and social responsibility targets. Yes, I am an Arsenal fan.
I was going to write an article that mapped each Premier League team to a WCM product, but realised I’d be sued by anyone I associated with Blackburn Rovers or Stoke City. Nevertheless, I think their are a number of useful analogies to be drawn

Beautiful doesn’t always mean effective

Some WCM products have editorial interfaces that entice you to play around with them: thoughtfully designed with user-friendly tools like drag and drop, red-lining, or DAM integration. Others practically repulse: ugly web forms with incomprehensible labelling and non-sensical reference data.

But don’t assume that a beautiful GUI makes for more effective content management processes. Just as Bolton Wanderers are restyling their footballing approach under Owen Coyle to be more appealing, this won’t mean they’ll finish higher than they used to under the ugly pragmatism of Sam Allardyce. Give free reign to your editors’ creative spark and you may find your content strategy going down the pan.

A solid financial basis

Virtually no Premier League football club is without debt. WCM vendors are in a less financially perilous situation but hardly paragons of financial stability. This should make you wary in your contractual dealings with them. Always hold proprietary source code in Escrow. It’s not much of a security but it’s better than none at all. Check the financial stability of services partners and weigh this against their ability to deliver: a team that’s doing badly is likely to have disincentivised staff and the best of them may be looking to leave.

Be wary too of cutting deals that actually disincentivise your suppliers: if you cut their profit margin too much they’ll focus on more profitable accounts when the going gets tough. And the last thing you want to do is see your team go into administration like Portsmouth last season.

Living off past glories?

Just as some Premier League clubs look down on new entrants and see themselves as the established top tier, some WCM vendors subscribe to a similarly blinkered view. Don’t choose a team just because they’re an established player and appear in an analyst’s magic quadrant. Take a look at the wider field and figure out what it is you’re really after from your supplier. Having a vendor with a good reputation in the industry won’t improve your website any more than winning the league 49 years ago makes you a better club today.

The long-term view

So if you’re ignoring the past, what abou the future? No need for Paul the octopus: take a look at company history. Has there been a recent big-money acquisition? If so, you can be certain that the vendor is going to be focussing more immediate efforts on proper integration of that product rather than on new features. Assimilating new players takes time, as Manchester City discovered last season.

Or was the last release community-driven? If you don’t have the means to engage actively with that community, how are you planning on getting the enhancement (and fixes) you need the product to deliver? You’re unlikely to hold any sway over the selection despite your investment.

Where’s the support?

A crucial consideration must be who’s going to support your team once you kick off. Is there a loyal and knowledgable fan base? Are they likely to up sticks for another trendier team the minute the going gets tough? And where are they? If all your support is in a different timezone, you’re going to have problems.

In my experience, transatlantic services particularly suffer from this Manchester United syndrome of long-distance support. Many European vendors have struggled to provide north American clients with the same levels of support as clients in Europe and the reverse is certainly true. The problem is is seldom resolved by takeovers, when a larger company may bring a much larger support team, but product experts remain few and far between.

It’s not about loyalty

In the end, remember the crucial difference between implementing a WCM and following a football team: you’re a client, not a fan. I’ll support Arsenal even when the players all inevitably collapse with cruciate ligament injuries before Christmas; I’m a lifelong fan. But if you’re not getting what you need from your team, relegate them and seek your glory elsewhere.

I have written
about MindTouch several times (see for example: MindTouch 2009
Provides Enhanced Development Platform for Rich Collaborative Applications). I
recently spoke again with Aaron Fulkerson, their Co-Founder and CEO, on MindTouch 2010. First we set some context for
this latest release.

MindTouch was
first released in 2006 as an Open Source wiki-based platform. The initial goal
was to attract users and this has been achieved with over a l million users in
hundreds of thousands of installations. In 2008 MindTouch began to sell support
subscriptions. Then in 2009 they released a commercial version that sits on top
of the free Open Source core. They discovered that many users were building
product and service documentation with the MindTouch platform.  These strategic efforts were used to
engage potential customers, retain them, and increase cost savings through greater
self-service.  The decision was
made to create MindTouch 2010 to provide greater capability through an
intelligent platform for this growing use case.  I think it was a wise decision.

As Aaron
describes in a recent Forbes article, The
Evolution Of User Manuals, product and service documentation has evolved from a
tactical cost center to a revenue generating strategic tool. The advent of
online documentation has learned with this transformation.  Now you can apply SEO to the
documentation to proactively attract potential customers and MindTouch has done
this. You can also track their pathway through the documentation to determine
their areas of interest and offer appropriate solutions, another area that
MindTouch supports. 

Aaron writes that some
companies that he has spoken to report that their documentation brings in over
50% of qualified leads. He also notes that in his own company receives 70% plus
of our site traffic from organic sources, and our documentation generates more
than half of our overall site traffic. In addition, over half of their lead
generation is driven by our documentation.

I can certainly believe this as I have seen similar
results. This applies to both self-service documentation and that which
supports call center reps. For example, is one company I worked with, the reps who
made full use of the supporting product and service documentation were three
times more likely to cross sell, moving from a below industry average achieved
by the non-users to an above industry average for the documentation users.

MindTounch 2010 has enhanced three major areas to
support this major use case. It now provides new capabilities for
authoring, discovery, and curation of strategic content:

To support authoring MindTouch
2010 offers a multi-user, XML-driven editing platform that supports all rich
media types. Users are able to publish in-a-click from commonly used desktop
tools. The Web Oriented Architecture (WOA) ensures data portability. They also
offer templates and Aaron walked me through some of these. A tutorial template
not only provided short cuts but also offered good instructional format
suggestions.  Here is a sample opening
page offering templates.

 To support discovery MindTouch
2010 publishes content in a web-based format, dynamically generating navigation
from content semantics and including effective search engine optimization
tools. The enterprise-ready Adaptive Search engine delivers increasingly high
quality results by learning from your users’ behavior.

Content curation is
great new capability. To support this MindTouch 2010
introduces some targeted curation analytics. Customers can analyze their
documentation by quality, aging and customer behavior in aggregate or by
specific topics.  You can use
out-of the-box reports can create custom versions. Here are two sample reports
covering aging and rating..

Aaron showed me a few client examples. Autodesk
provides CAD software. They had a large user base. So they provided a MindTouch
powered set of educational services. Based on participants’ interest, they now
can cross sell through the educational materials.  The pilot was very successful and now they are rolling the
offering across all products. This is a clever approach.

I like what they are doing. It is a great example
of a company listening to its users to identify an expanding market
opportunity.  They not only
listened well but also provided some useful new capabilities to serve this use
case.

As enterprise 2.0
matures, its uses are getting more focused. I have been hearing more about it
use in product development. Here is a timely Forrester report on the topic, Use
Social Computing To Build Differentiated Product Development Processes by Roy C. Wildeman.  As the summary states, “in
recent years, leading product development organizations have proven the value
of greater cross- functional collaboration to harness
contributions from across the business and bring great products to market. With
the rise in Social Computing among consumers and enterprises alike, development
teams are further seeking to transform how they collaborate both internally and
externally in key processes like ideation, requirements management, detailed
development, and aftermarket support.”

It makes the claim
that “succeed in the future, business process professionals must expand their
thinking beyond traditional product development solutions and start
experimenting with new social technologies.” 
I certainly agree. As another Forrester report (The HERO Index: Finding Empowered
Employees by Ted Schadler and Josh
Bernoff) notes,
the more extensive and creative uses of social computing within the enterprise
have often come from marketing. To be really competitive, companies need to
embed social media and enterprise 2.0 throughout the organization and certainly
in the product development area.

Forrester found three main
opportunities exist for development teams to further innovate with enterprise
2.0. Note that Forrester uses the term social computing technologies and I am
converting this to enterprise 2.0 to go beyond technology. The first one is to
enable teams to better collaborate across distance or silos. The second is to
bring in outside communities for product ideas, answers, and feedback. The
third is integrate new services through social computing into traditional product
offerings.

These all make sense.
The second (aka crowdsourcing) as certainly got a big play in the press. I have
a seen a number of R&D teams move from traditional reporting through email
and attachments to blogs and wikis with great productivity increases.  One satellite radio firm had its first
on-time and on-budget development effort when it switched to a social computing
platform for project reporting. One of the reasons attributed to this success
was the increased transparency and its effect on individual and team attention
to quality. The MIT Sloan CIO found that using blogs for project reporting greatly
increased his efficiency in program monitoring and team mentoring. The
Forrester report has a great chart on how social networking expands knowledge
capacity beyond the usual “Go-to” resources for project development teams that
makes explicit some of the possibilities for improvement.

The report also points out some of the
potential obstacles to achieving success in these three areas including concerns
over intellectual property and security, as well as the potential chaos from
too much unstructured information and the need for clear governance. It also
suggests some useful ways to address these issues.  The report concludes with a set of recommendations for
taking advantage of the opportunities within social computing. 

Chris Bucchere

By Chris Bucchere, Chief Executive Officer, Mojo

Lately I’ve been really overwhelmed by my email inbox. This is not a new problem, but in the past I’ve been able to keep it at under a hundred emails; recently it has grown to nearly 300 and it has really begun to interfere with my getting things done.

So, last night, I took a good, hard look at what was really IN my inbox. About 40% of the notes consisted of links sent to me by well-meaning people who thought I should check them out for various reasons. Another 30% were suggestions on how to make our products, marketing materials, services, etc. better from employees, customers, partners and other well-meaning people. Of the remaining 30%, about half were personal introductions to potential partners, customers, investors or other people with whom the authors thought I would want to connect. The other half were ‘to-do’ items of a business or personal nature, some sent by me to myself (ick!) or by other people.

My email inbox breakdown

I think maybe one or two messages actually consisted of correspondence — by that I mean something like the letters of yesteryear that we used to send through snail mail. It’s interesting to see how the bastardized email of today is so different from the purpose for which it was invented, but that’s the subject of a whole other article. However, while I’m digressing, it’s worth noting that email functions brilliantly as a “better matchbox” than snail mail, but at the same time it performs really poorly at all the other functions that it’s used for today. Email is not a contact management system, a customer relationship management (CRM) system, a link-sharing/social bookmarking tool, nor a support ticketing/issue tracking system. Not by a long shot.

The goal for me was to put all these messages that shouldn’t remain as emails into their proper home so I could deal with them appropriately while maintaining my sanity. Now that I had performed some analytics, it was time to get organized! Here are the tools I used to clean up the mess: Basecamp, Highrise and Instapaper. Instapaper is free; however the 37signals products Basecamp and Highrise carry a small monthly fee.

[Note: They also have trial versions, but don't expect to get too far with them since 37signals made the free versions just useful enough to show you their value without actually providing any.]

Getting from almost 300 emails to under 20 took about two hours and it was time well spent. I made one pass through my bloated inbox and took one of these actions, based on the type of email:

Email Type #1: “Hey, you should check out this link because. . . .”

A simple tool for saving web pages to read later

Opened the link and used the “Read Later” bookmarklet from Instapaper to save the link for when I have to time to read it. If the email containing the link had something interesting in it (besides the link), I copied that into the notes field for that link once I had saved it to Instapaper. If you care to share what you’re reading/bookmarking, you can also use a del.icio.us bookmarklet for this. I find Instapaper easier though, because you can bookmark a link with one click. Del.icio.us forces you to enter tags and other metadata, which increases friction and slows down the process of bookmarking.

Bottom line: Bookmarking, per se, is a simple, rote task that shouldn’t take more than one click to accomplish.

Email Type #2: “Hey, you should make your product better by doing this. . . .”

Pop the most important things out of the backlog and move them into the current release to-do list

Read the email. If there were specific action items associated with it, I created to-dos in Basecamp (under the project for the appropriate product) so that we can address them in a future release. We maintain a to-do list for each release of each product and another to-do list that serves as a backlog for each product. (Some agile tools refer to this as “the icebox.”) When we’re planning a release, we pop the most important things out of the backlog and move them into the current release to-do list.

If the to-dos were general, more thematic suggestions without specific action items associated with them, I copied the suggestions to one of our design writeboards in Basecamp. Then I responded to the email thanking them for the feedback and deleted it.

Bottom line: Product feedback and support tickets belong in Basecamp or a support ticketing system … or even a CRM, but they should never be kept in email as email is not the right tool for tracking the support ticket cycle.

you’re using email as a CRM system, important communiqués are going to slip through the cracks

Email Type #3: “Hey, you should sell to (or partner with) so-and-so. . . ”

Forward the email to Highrise’s email dropbox. Delete. Done. When I process my Highrise queue of messages, I can decide whether or not to pursue these leads on a case-by-case basis. Sales leads belong in your CRM system so that they can be tracked and managed. Email is the wrong tool for tracking the sales cycle. If you want to close sales deals and you’re using email as your CRM system, important communiqués are going to slip through the cracks and you’re going to lose business as a result.

Bottom line: E = mc2 but Email != CRM.








Email Type #4: “Hey, Chris, meet so-and-so. Hey, so-and-so, meet Chris”

Reply All and start the process of scheduling a good time to talk. However, there’s a bit of a hole in this, because if I then delete the message, how do I ensure that so-and-so and I actually end up talking/meeting? If you have any suggestions about how you’ve solved this problem and what tools you’ve used (besides stinkin’ email), please let me know in the comments field associated with this blog post. I guess I could use our CRM for this, but that’s kind of like using a bazooka to kill flies.

Bottom line: I don’t know what the best tool for this is, but I do know that it’s most definitely not email.

Email Type #5: To-do item (not related to a product or a lead)

Put in on my to-do list. Right now, somewhat ironically, this is an email that I keep perpetually in draft status. To-do lists are a funny thing. I’ve used Remember the Milk, Google Spreadsheets/Documents and a number of other tools, but frankly, nothing beats a text file. By keeping it as a draft email in Gmail, I always have access to it from anywhere, buy you can easily accomplish this with Google Docs too, or a number of other tools.

Bottom line: Your inbox should not be your to-do list. Use a text document, a to-do management tool or even a piece of paper and a pen. There’s something inherently gratifying about the physical, visceral action of scratching something off my to-do list with a big, fat marker (preferably a Sharpie). No tool I have encountered can come close to emulating that feeling of accomplishment.

Email Type #6: Personal Correspondence

Print it on nice paper, frame it and hang it on the wall! Seriously, these have gotten so rare, that I really don’t mind them at all.

Bottom line: This is what email was designed to do, so feel free to use it for that. Enjoy it, because your friends would probably rather update their Facebook status than send you an email. If they do send you emails (and there’s no to-do/action-item associated with them), then they’re a true friend. You should return the favor with a personal email of your own, or, if you really want to surprise them, drop a handwritten note to them in the postal mail, preferably with a designer stamp that reflects your sense of style. There’s something really sexy about being retrosexual — try it, I guarantee you’ll get great results!

Conclusion: I didn’t quite reach Inbox Zero before my head hit the keyboard, but I am down to under 20 emails in my Inbox. Every time I hit “delete” I could feel my stress level, my blood pressure and my state of disorganization decreasing proportionately.

So, how many messages are in your inbox? What do you think of my approach? What tools and strategies do you use to manage all this email insanity? I love to hear your comments. Just don’t email them to me!

About the Author Chris Bucchere is CEO of Mojo — a game where fans compete to unlock badges and earn point awards on their favorite websites. Currently a Dogpatch Labs resident entrepreneur, Chris has lived in San Francisco since 1981.

The vendor famous for bringing us PDF-files, Adobe Systems, announced their intention to acquire CMS-vendor Day Software last week. Day had been rumoured as an acquisition candidate for a while, but not by Adobe. The acquisition is expected to close in December and with the unanimous support of the Board of Directors of Day, this looks like a done deal.

As usual when this happens, the vendor to be acquired is very optimistic about the future prospects. To quote from a message to Day Software customer and partners:

this will serve as a new catalyst for Day to accelerate our investment in product innovation, our customer community, and our global ecosystem of channel and technology partners

The Day management team is understandably in a happy mood, but when it comes to product improvements, Day really has a case to prove over the coming months. Most in our community did not see this as good news for the product or for the standards that Day has been championing. I’ve been talking to customers in the past weeks and here is our take on what the acquisition could mean to customers:

• Until the deal has been closed, Day will continue to operate as a separate company with its own partner and customer community
• Product updates are likely to be delayed: Day is known for letting itself distract by such things as open source and standard involvements with less focus on delivering a solid and easy-to-use product. It will now inevitably be seriously distracted for a while, whilst getting to know the ins and outs of the new owner and whilst trying to teach a large sales force how to work enterprise web content management deals.
• Don’t expect CQ5, Day’s main product, to receive much attention inside Adobe. To put things in perspective,  Day is a very small fish indeed next to the whale that is Adobe. Adobe has 8,600 employees compared to Day’s less than 150. Compared to previous acquisitions by Adobe, e.g. Macromedia (1,400 employees) and Omniture (>1,000 employees), this is quite a small deal.
• No overlap with existing Adobe products. Quite unlike recent industry acquisitions, e.g. when Open Text bought Vignette or when Oracle bought Sun, there seems to be no product overlap. As part of the expected integration of the two companies, Day will operate as a product line within Adobe’s Digital Enterprise Solutions Business Unit
• Adobe emphasised integrating proprietary technologies such as Air and Flash in the acquisition announcement and did not mention anything about Day’s work on standards. This was quite worrying to several Day customers.
• CQ5 moving down in the market. At the moment CQ5 is overkill for anything but complex and global websites. Expect that to change when Adobe begins to put its engineering footprint on the product.

What should you do as a customer?

1. Use the change and added uncertainty to get discounted rates or freebies. Day has an expensive product but is known to be flexible on licensing models
2. Keep reminding your Day Software contacts of your existance, while they are busy closing the deal. Expect some new faces in 2011 as the organisational integration kicks in and as always make sure you get an experienced team on your project.
3. Prepare to listen to some funny stories from the competitors. Usually some use an opportunity like this to spread some good old FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt). Fellow Swiss-vendor Magnolia have already started this with a public blog: Day to be acquired by Adobe – implications?

More detailed and interesting coverage of the deal:

• CMS Wire: Perspectives: What the Adobe + Day Software Deal Means, Part 1
• ComputerworldUK: Will Adobe See the Light (of Day)?
• Jon Marks: A Fine Day For Adobe
• mwd advisors: Adobe acquires Day Software to flesh out enterprise portfolio
• Real Story Group: ECM Perspective and DAM Perspective

and finally for extra credits read: In defence of PDF, an interesting perspective from a new Day employee saying that “Day has a strong prejudice in favor of HTML as the one true and proper Web format for documents”.

All the tired horses in the sun
How’m I supposed to get any ridin’ done? Hmm.
- ALL THE TIRED HORSES

Where there is smoke, there is fire. In this case, it’ll be a shitstorm of a fire that’ll consume everything useful in it’s path. A bit like a Scorched Earth Campaign of Content Management.

Of course I’m talking about the Autonomy/Open Text speculation here (@hakana), here (@ldallasBMOC) and here (@piewords). In truth, the few rumours are, according to the crowds, highly unlikely to have any substance so this whole post is a waste of time. Apart from photos of CEOs in bed with hookers, no-one in Twitterville can produce a single good reason for it that I can swallow. But if this post even slightly reduces the miniscule chance of this joke of a deal materialising, it’s time well spent.

The whole is less than the sum of the parts

Onward. It’s pretty clear there is no way that this deal could make a new sale more likely. The number of different CMS and search products The Firm would have warrants the invention of a new Collective Noun. How about a Gaggle of Products? Or Confusion of Products. Or Mindfuck of Products? Should some poor customer go through a vendor selection exercise and pick Opentonomytext, they’d need to go through another one to pick the product. Ain’t gonna happen.

And the poor existing customers. Following the Open Text/Vignette deal, many poor customers are still wondering whether or when their product will be discontinued. They’re playing Russian Roulette with about 2 bullets in the chamber. If this deal happens, they’ll have about 4 bullets. Some will jump ship, so the whole idea of creating a maintenance revenue cash cow doesn’t make sense either. In simple maths terms: (Autonomy Maintenance 2011) + (Open Text Maintenance 2011) < (Opentonomytext Maintenance 2011).

Spare a thought for the search engineers at Vignette. They OEM’ed Autonomy as their search for years. “Best of Breed”, they all cried. Then arch-rival Interwoven was aquired by Autonomy. “We’re not paying our arch rival cash every time we sell a product”, they  cried. “Autonomy is a piece of shit. Let’s embed the Open Text search engine.” So they did. Hopefully they didn’t delete the code, cause they may be flipping it back pretty soon.

And spare a thought for yours truly. I’ve pushed my MS Paint skills to the limit creating the Super Spliced Open Text Logo. I think the only way I could make a logo for the new beast is on a Möbius strip, and I don’t have any lying around.

Now I’m not saying that the road ahead for either company is paved with gold. But they’ve both got some good products, some great people and a fair bit of cash. If they roll up their sleeves and innovate, they might just be okay. If they keep playing Pass The Parcel with products that develop more slowly than tectonic plates, they’re toast. Wait! Hold on a second! What’s that putrid smell? Oh, look, it’s an an elephant graveyard. And elephants don’t make good software. Especially dead ones.

P.S. Remember, this isn’t actually going to happen. Surely. They’re gonna buy someone else. Answers on a postcard.

I recently received an email from someone whom I will call…Socrates.  He asked a question and I wanted to share it for discussion publicly.  First the question, then my reasons for the public discourse.

Laurence, I have been working on Documentum since version 2. I am now working on DCM 6.5 sp3. I find that the quality of the product is going down every release. What do you think?

The reason that I am bringing it up publically is because I don’t have a clear-cut answer.  As with products from most vendors, some releases are better than others.  I also only have direct experience with Documentum since the 4i release at the end of ’99.  To top it off, I haven’t used every component, much less every component of every release.

Of course, I have some concerns.  I saw Rick Devenuti speak at EMC World and he seemed preoccupied with addressing quality issues.  Whether these are long-standing or new is something we can discuss at the end, where I have a couple more thoughts.

In between, I am going to share some of my “quality” stories here, both good and bad.  I’m hoping that Johnny, Scott, Lee, and Robin all chime into the conversation.  Please do so yourself.

Remember, there is no “right” answer.  We are merely looking for experiences.

Life with 4i

I entered the Documentum world less than a month after the release of Documentum 4i.  The “i” should tell you all you need to know about the timing of the release.  I am hard pressed to describe the highlights of the release, but there are a few a gleaned while working with my colleagues who were old hands at EDMS98.

• Workflow: It was new in 4i, replacing the old router method.  It had some issues with larger, more complex, workflows, but it was also the 1.0 version of a major feature.  Documentum worked hard to get it fixed, but I remember old Bob cussing at the machine when it would blow-up.
• RightSite: Was better than EDMS98, but man did it have limits.  This wasn’t a quality thing though, just a limit to the technology and design.  All web interfaces were pretty primitive back then.
• Goodbye WorkSpace: That desktop client was an old standby.  The install was kept around by Documentum techies for years and used until the old DMCL library was removed.  That shows a lot of quality in WorkSpace and in the backward compatibility of the DMCL over the years.

That is my baseline.  Interesting days.  The Workflow issues made me worry about quality, but back then I was more concerned with learning the complexity than dealing with the quality.

Carving a Path to 5.3

There were some basic iterations of 4, but with the 5.x product, there were some issues.  I didn’t deal with a lot of them as I waited until 5.2.5 to put it into a real production environment, but forget 5.1 and 5.2.  There were a lot of general issues.

There was a lot going on in this release.  Everyone’s favorite was the new Web Development Kit (WDK) and the growing usage of the DFC.  I think the Java Method Server may have been new in the 5.x release, but that is a little fuzzy.  If anyone knows for sure, please share.

5.2.5 was okay, but 5.3 was a total nightmare.  Forget the core product, the issue was the new Index Server.  FAST was “fast”, except in getting it to work correctly.  There was a large difference in the wilds of the data center from the clean world of the Documentum test-beds.  It took several service packs to get it right.  I think SP3 was the SP where you actually had to blow away your index and start over.  The lessons learned from this debacle have led to a much more conservative course for releasing the new Enterprise Search Server.  The slow pace to release is frustrating, but so was search blowing-up in production.

By 5.3 SP4/5, life settled down.  Since then I don’t think I’ve upgraded because I had to upgrade, only because I wanted to go ahead and do it.

Which brings us to the world of 6+…

Attack of the D-Versions

Starting with a large number of presentations in 2007 talking about D6, every version has been referred to as Dx.x.  I think some people in the marketing department wish they hadn’t let that one hit the slides at EMC World 2007.

Aside from that, I’ve been following a simple approach, only upgrade to SP1 or higher of any version.  Since I’ve done that, I’ve only had two real problems.

• LDAP Synch: To be fair, this is suffering from old age.  They have spent a lot of time trying to fix it, but I keep having to find all sorts of new ways to work around it.  It works great for smaller user populations, but when you start to cruise past the 5,000 mark, things start to become fun.
• Federations: This isn’t a loss in quality. This stems directly from the fact that the Federation process hasn’t changed in 10+ years.

Now, I know that there have been problems here and there.  I know the Branch Office Caching Server had some issues when it first came out.  I also know that most of the products that I see having issues are usually shiny new “1.0″ products.  The core Content Server has been doing fine, as have many other products that are just “evolving”.  While it is a shame that you don’t want generally want to install the first release of a new product, that has actually been consistent for years.  I also use the same approach with Microsoft and other major vendors as well.

There is a lot to test, and a lot of permutations in the real world.  There will always be things that aren’t found in testing because you and I will always be throwing these products into unclean, old, cluttered repositories that EMC just doesn’t have lying around.

So the real question is two parts:

1. Have you seen lots of issues in existing products that seem to be creeping up in each release?
2. With new products/major features, have they been more problematic or do they have the same (or less) issues than previously released products.

Other food for thought…was Rick harping on fixing new quality or old quality issues?  I suspect old.  Is the “focus” on quality just typical marketing, realization that they need to fix it, or something they are going to fix instead of innovating further?

Let’s figure this out…

Here are my
AppGap posts for July. I am also writing in another Corante blog, FastForward
(see right side bar for links), The AppGap posts began toward the end of
January 2008.  Here, I am primarily
doing product commentaries with a few other things thrown in. Below are the
ones for July. There will be more in August.