As the Hannon Hill Services team continues to implement a wide variety of Cascade Server projects for our clients, we thought that it might be interesting to share some examples with you.

Remember portals? I
have heard about a number of cases where enterprise 2.0 collaboration systems
have replaced portals. One firm even replaced their portal with Facebook and
got a lot of PR for it. Is this a trend? I do not mean the Facbook part, just
the E20 part.

Perhaps but a recent
Forrester report, Portal Servers Refuse To Go Quietly, by Tim Waters found that
portals are still popular in many circles. As the report summary cited, “portal
server technologies continue to be widely deployed by enterprises. Although
leading vendors are evolving portal servers into broad content and
collaboration platforms, the core portal services — aggregation “on the glass”
and user authorization for access control and personalization — remain the
leading use cases. Newer alternatives, including open source platforms and mashups,
are gaining ground.”

So portals may remain
popular but they need to look over their c shoulders as the report also
recommended that, “knowledge management teams should carefully evaluate their
needs to determine if a portal server layer is appropriate.”  

Drawing for a survey
taken in North America and Europe, Q4 2009, they found that 20% of the firms
surveyed planned to expand or upgrade existing portal server implementations,
26% had already implemented and were not expanding while 15% planned to
implement over the next year or longer. 
 

There were some
concerns. Many users suffered from the complexity and the extensive
customization effort. I have seen many of these drawn out portal
implementations first hand.  They
can be the darling of the solutions integrators looking for big time projects
with ever expanding budgets.  The
report offers a number of instances of similar outcomes. It
also said that the majority of the users they interviewed were surprised by the
amount of customization required. 
I am not surprised at this finding as I have rarely seen a portal
project come in on budget or time.

Downsized budgets can
be an obstacle for new portal efforts. 
The report found that many firms indicated that the
move toward Lean and Agile development practices has encouraged them to
reevaluate the rule of heavy handed portal servers. The report encourages
knowledge management and IT people to be aware of the other options available. 

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…

Check out the latest case study about the University of New Brunswick’s use of the Cascade Server WordPress connector.

If you’ve been on the fence about registering for the Cascade Server User Conference, take a look at the top five benefits of joining us in Atlanta, GA on September 13 – 14.

Make sure you don’t miss our upcoming webinar on Cascade Server 6.7!

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The highly-anticipated 2010 Cascade Server User Conference schedule is now available on our site.

Last week was a very frustrating time for me. For whatever reason, an unusually number of botnets decided to zero in on my Drupal site and created what I call an unintentional  Denial of Service attack (DOS). The attack was actually from spambots looking looking for script vulnerabilities found mainly in older versions of e107 and WordPress. Since the target of these spambots were non-Drupal pages, my Drupal site responded by delivering an unusually large number of “page not found” and “access denied” error pages. Eventually, these requests from a multitude of IPs were too many for my server to handle and for all intents and purposes the botnet attack caused a distributed denial of service that prevented me and my users from accessing the site.

These type of attacks on Drupal sites are nothing new and have been observed and discussed at great length at Drupal.org. However, my search at Drupal.org as well as Google didn’t really find a solution that completely addressed my problem. Trying to prevent a DDoS attack isn’t easy to begin with and at first the answers alluded me.

I originally looked at Drupal for the solution to my problems. While I’ve used Mollom for months, Mollom is designed to fight off comment spam while the bots attacking my sight were looking for script vulnerabilities that didn’t exist. So with Mollom being the wrong tool to fight off this kind of attack, I decided to take a look at the Drupal contributed model Bad Behavior. Bad Behavior is a set of PHP scripts which prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots then blocks such access and logs their attempts. I actually installed an “unofficial” version of the Bad Behavior module which packages the Bad Behavior 2.1 scripts and utilizes services from Project Honey Pot.

As I had already suspected, looking for Drupal to solve this botnet attack wasn’t the answer. Pretty much all Bad Behavior did for me was to take the time Drupal was spending delivering “page not found” error pages and use it to deliver “access denied” error pages. My Drupal site is likely safer with the Bad Behavior module installed, but it was the wrong tool to help me reduce the botnets from overtaxing Drupal running on my server. Ideally, you would like to prevent the attacks ever reaching your server by taking a look at such things as the firewall, router, and switches. However, since I didn’t have access to the hardware, I decided it was time to look at my Apache configuration.

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ATLANTA, GA – June 29, 2010 — Hannon Hill Corporation has released the most recent version of the company’s content management system, Cascade Server 6.7.