Out of the Blue - Michael Trafton's Blog

Josh Toub leads the Alfresco team here at Blue Fish, and he’s just written a new article that can help Alfresco developers improve the maintainability and supportability of their Alfresco solutions.

When a developer customizes Alfresco to add a new webscript or portlet or modify an existing class, the common practice is to create new source code files in the same directory structure as the out-of-the-box Alfresco source files. This can cause maintenance problems because it’s hard to tell which files have been modified and which ones were original. It makes troubleshooting and upgrading much more difficult, and it’s harder to share your code or reuse it in other solutions.

Josh’s article shows how you can configure Alfresco to look in a special place for your custom code so that you can keep it out of the main Alfresco directory structure. Read Painless Alfresco Development: Improving Supportability through Source Code Organization for more information.

To help ring in the new year and help folks understand some of the benefits of Alfresco’s latest Enterprise release, Blue Fish is hosting a Lunch and Learn session at our Austin offices on Jan 27th.

This session is a must for CIOs, Senior IT Managers, Enterprise Architects and anyone evaluating ECM solutions. We will cover the following topics:

• A comparison of Alfresco Community, Alfresco Enterprise, and Traditional ECM
• A review of Alfresco Enterprise 3.2
• Alfresco implementation Best Practices

Space is limited to 25 people, so book your place as soon as possible. Click here to register for the Alfresco lunch and learn session.

The session will last 2 hours, from 11am – 1pm, and of course we’ll provide lunch. Blue Fish is located in Downtown Austin - here’s a map to the Blue Fish office.

There’s a nice article on CenterStage over at CMSWire. It’s got several screenshots and a good overview of the features. CenterStage is EMC’s replacement for eRoom and they are hoping it will help reduce the number of customers who are defecting to SharePoint. I’ve seen CenterStage at EMC World, and I was impressed. EMC isn’t known for creating the best UIs and front ends (they are more well known for scalability and their solid back end), but CenterStage has a lot of features I like better than SharePoint.

Read it at http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-20/centerstage-how-emc-is-taking-on-microsoft-sharepoint-005310.php.

The Documentum blogging community has really grown over the past year or so. There are lots of people writing about Documentum these days, and there’s never been more perspectives on what’s happening with the technology and with EMC’s Content Management and Archiving group.

Here’s a list of the Documentum-related blogs I read regularly.

• Craig’s Musings - I first met Craig Randall at a Documentum conference about a million years ago. At that time, Craig was the king of Documentum’s Desktop Client and guru of their Microsoft technology strategy. Today, he’s one of EMC’s biggest brains and one of their best bloggers. I read everything he writes.
• Ask Johnny! - I think everyone in the Documentum community knows about Johnny Gee. He’s the most prolific member of the community that I know, answering more questions on dm_developer and EMC’s forums and everyone else combined. Johnny is a great guy and has been around for years - he really knows his stuff. Johnny doesn’t blog that much anymore, but his archives are full of great content.
• Word of Pie - Pie is one of the most prolific bloggers in the Documentum blogosphere. His posts range from technical how-to articles to opinion pieces and book reviews. Along with Big Men on Content, he’s one of the few bloggers that really expresses an opinion. I like that.
• Big Men on Content - Run by Lee Dallas and Marko Sillanpaa, this blog covers Documentum and the broader ECM industry as well. I’ve known Lee for over ten years, and I’ve always enjoyed his opinions.
• Paul Warren - Paul is an EMC developer focused (I think) on Documentum Composer. His blog posts are typically technical and very useful.
• Brilliant Leap - This is the blog for Selective Search, a recruiting agency run by Virginia Backaitis, who has been a member of the Documentum community for (I’m guessing here) more than 10 years. I’ve know her for 7 or 8 years at least. This blog is not technical, and it focuses mostly on EMC’s sales and marketing strategies and tactics.
• Observing Content Management - Lee Smith is not a frequent blogger, but when he does, he speaks about his personal experiences with Documentum and his thoughts on the industry.
• Never Talk When You Can Nod - Andrew Chapman is the GM of the SharePoint Technologies Group for EMC’s CMA group. We’ve been friends for several years, I think, and Andrew is really a super great guy. His blog mostly covers topics related to how SharePoint integrates with Documentum.
• Say Scheveningen - This is Don Robertson’s blog full of Documentum technical tips. Really good stuff in here.

Robert Scoble interviewed John Newton recently about Alfresco. Two things about the interview stood out to me:

1. Scoble had an idea of what Alfresco was, and he sort of inserted that into John Newton’s mouth. I wouldn’t describe Alfresco Share the way that John did, and it was clear to me that he was using Scoble’s language for Scoble’s benefit. I’m not sure that it turned out to be a very compelling or accurate description of Alfresco.
2. It’s clear that Scoble is focused more on Internet and Web 2.0 technologies than he is commercial/enterprise technologies like Alfresco. His questions and comments would have made more sense if Aflresco was a Web site rather than the enterprise software that it is.

At any rate, you get to see John Newton talking about Alfresco, which is always a good thing.

Watch the video here: Alfresco Enterprise Content Management on Scobelizer.

John Newton, founder of Alfresco, has a great description of the just-released Alfresco Community Edition 3.2. In it, he makes the case that recessions like the one we are in are drivers for disruptive technologies, and he sees Alfresco as disruptive in the ECM market because it costs about 5% of traditional ECM platforms.

Some of the new capabilities in Alfresco 3.2 are

• Records Management
• Improved Capabilities in Share (Alfresco’s collaboration application), including improved use in Extranet environments
• Email Archiving via the IMAP email protocol
• iPhone Interface for Share
• Improved Capabilities in Deploying Large WCM Solutions

John’s post is chock-full of information about Alfresco 3.2, and I highly recommend taking a look at it.

I’m very excited to announce that Blue Fish is now an Alfresco partner. Over the past 4 years, Alfresco has come out of nowhere to take the Enterprise Content Management community by storm. Alfresco has been downloaded over 1.5 MILLION times, and their platform gets better and better with each release.

Founded by John Newton, one of the co-founders of Documentum, Alfresco provides an ECM platform at a price nearly 95% less than a traditional ECM solution. In fact, their standard license is about half of the cost of a traditional ECM vendor’s yearly maintenance fees. Think about that for a minute - for about half of what a company is spending on maintenance fees for their existing ECM solution, they can move to a fully supported Alfresco solution. That’s a very compelling savings.

Why Alfresco?

Alfresco has a Great ROI

With the current economic climate, our clients are looking for ways to reduce the TCO of their ECM infrastructure. Several of our clients are migrating all or part of their content from expensive traditional ECM platforms (Documentum, FileNet, OpenText) to other platforms that they feel have lower TCO. I’ve talked to at least three pharmaceutical companies, for example, that are moving part of their content out of Documentum because they feel that it’s overkill for their needs. The content in question isn’t regulated and isn’t used very frequently, and they just can’t justify the cost of Documentum licenses for it. One of my clients told me, “It’s like keeping your Timex watch in a bank vault. That makes sense for a Rolex, but it’s overkill for a Timex.” These companies are continuing to use Documentum for their most critical content, but they are using other platforms for less critical content. OSHA, NYPD, Morgan Stanley, and Cisco are just some of the companies that have transitioned from one of the “Big Three” ECM vendors to Alfresco.

Alfresco Broadens Our Market

Alfresco is a great choice for smaller organizations or departments within larger companies that can’t justify the expense of a traditional ECM solution, because they don’t need all the horsepower and don’t operate at true enterprise scale. Alfresco has been benchmarked at over 100 Million documents, which is orders of magnitude more than most ECM systems are currently managing. By partnering with Alfresco, Blue Fish can take our brand of ECM services to more companies than we have been able to in the past.

Familiar Technologies

Alfresco is built using technologies with which we are very familiar. It’s a Java-based solution, and many of the technologies that are used as the building blocks of Alfresco (Hibernate, Spring, Freemarker, etc.) are technologies Blue Fish has been using in our solutions for years. Because the Alfresco technology stack is so familiar to our developers, it’s easy to ramp up and adapt our existing products and solutions to Alfresco.

What about Documentum?

We still love Documentum, and we still believe that there is a ton of value in using Documentum as your Enterprise Content Management platform. Especially for those huge organizations with really complex content management processes, Documentum is one of the best games in town. The breath and depth of the Documentum platform is staggering, there are hundreds of third-party add-ons and integrations, and they continue to innovate and acquire new technologies that keep them at the top of the pack. If your IT strategy is to invest in a single ECM technology across your entire organization, Documentum is a very good choice.

But more and more companies are moving away from a single ECM platform and are instead deploying a hybrid model with Documentum handling the more elaborate content management tasks and Alfresco taking care of the less complex needs. Also, when a smaller department needs content management, they often can’t justify the expense of a commercial ECM platform such as Documentum, so they often just make do with a file system. With Alfresco, a company can provide ECM tools to a larger percentage of their knowledge workers than they can with Documentum alone.

We see Documentum and Alfresco as two different types of tools. There are situations where Documentum is going to be the best fit and others where Alfresco is the best fit.

What I learned about CenterStage at EMC World 2009

CenterStage was all the rage this year at EMC World, and it looks like it’s eventually going to be Documentum’s primary knowledge worker UI. CenterStage replaces eRoom, and it provides a collaboration environment for teams. CenterStage works like this: You define a “space”, which is like a room in eRoom - it’s a collection of documents, discussion threads, wiki pages, blogs, etc. all related to a single project or a single team. You can invite users to become members of this space, and then they can organize all their information about that project together in one place. The concept of spaces or rooms is not new - SharePoint, Alfresco, and several others use this same paradigm.

CenterStage is pretty slick looking, and I think it will make a big splash in the Documentum community. The search function is a million times better than WebTop’s, and with the addition of Blogs, Wikis, and Discussions it’s much more suited to the way teams share information than WebTop. WebTop and other document management clients are constrained to documents only, and most teams that use WebTop end up sending a ton of emails to each other to share all the information that doesn’t fit nicely into a document. With CenterStage, a lot of the information that goes into emails could easily transition to CenterStage, being stored in Discussion Groups, on Wiki Pages, as Blog Entries, or (in an upcoming release) as Data Tables (kind of like an online spreadsheet). Not only do your end users benefit from improved collaboration and information sharing, but the organization gets all the traditional compliance benefits that Documentum offers, such as centrally managed retention policies, archiving, eDiscovery, etc.

One of the nice features of CenterStage is the ability to scope your searches. When you issue a search, you can tell CenterStage where to search:

• Search within your current space
• Search within all you favorite spaces
• Search all the spaces you have access to
• Search the entire Documentum repostiory (assuming you are using Documentum for standard document management as well)
• Use EMC’s Federated Search Services to search other repositories, such as FileNet, Wikipedia, etc.

Earlier this week, I mistakenly reported that CenterStage was developed using the FLEX interface, but I was wrong. It’s actually a Rich Internet Application built using a JavaScript framework called Ext JS. There are a couple of components that utilize FLEX, but it’s not a FLEX application. Here’s how CenterStage works. When you load CenterStage for the first time, your browser loads up a ton of fancy JavaScript (the Ext framework). Then, whenever you click on a folder or a document, the browser uses JavaScript to make a call to a DFS Web Service. The result is returned as XML, and Ext then renders that XML as HTML. This is notably different from how WDK applications work. In WDK, a JSP page or Servlet makes a call to Documentum, renders the result as HTML, and then passes that HTML down to the browser. In Ext, there’s no JSP or Servlet acting as a middleman - the browser makes the call directly to the web service and then formats the result and writes it into the DOM.

CenterStage will require a new skill set to customize, and there will be fewer customization points than are available in WebTop. The next release of CenterStage has limited extension points, but these will open up over time. Right now, the main customizations are the ability to create new “widgets”, little UI controls that can be included on Wiki Pages within CenterStage. These widgets are developed in JavaScript or Flex and make WebService calls to back-end services.

EMC World 2009 - Day 4 Recap and Day 5 Plans

Today, it seemed like every session that I attended was talking about xDB, EMC’s high-performance XML database. xDB is the product formerly known as X-Hive/DB, acquired by EMC in 2007. For the past couple of years, EMC has been selling xDB as a stand-alone product, but at the same time, they were busy integrating it with several of their existing products. But before we talk about that, I should probably bring you up to speed on what an XML database does.

An XML database is similar to a relational database except that instead of storing structured data in rows and columns, it stores semi-structured data in the form of XML files. xDB allows the use of XQuery to query the database and return chunks of XML, from an entire document (or several documents) to a single element. xDB treats the elements in XML files like the columns of a database.

Documentum has supported XML documents for over 10 years, but xDB brings that support to a whole new level. Take the following scenario, for example. Imagine you have a large XML document, like a product catalog from one of your suppliers. You get the catalog in XML format from your supplier, and you use it to generate pages on your web site that list the products you sell.

This scenario poses a challenge. You need to somehow get the data in this XML file into a form that can be displayed on your web site. Your web site is dynamic, with product catalog that can be sorted and searched, so you need to be able to query for individual products. What you need is a list of products, but all you have right now is a giant XML file with a <product> tag delineating each product.

In the past, to deal with this scenario, you would create an XML Application - a set of rules for processing the XML when it is imported into the repository. Your XML application would do two main things: first, it would “chunk” the XML file into smaller XML files, one for each product. These would all be linked into a virtual document that represented the main XML file. Your XML application would also parse out certain elements of the product (description, price, image URL, etc.) and write the values into metadata attributes on the document object. Now you have a list of product objects in the repository with attribute values that can be searched and displayed in a list. You would then write code on your web site to query the docbase and display your product catalog.

This approach has been used for years, and I used to build applications for the airline industry that used these techniques to manage huge Aircraft Maintenance Manuals. But there are some drawbacks.

First, in order for this to work, you must have a custom object type that contains attributes for all the elements of the XML file that you want to be able to search. That means you have to know which attributes will be displayed on the web site before you start managing your content. That’s often not the case. Second, you have to have a different object type for each type of product, because you’ll receive different XML files from different suppliers - the schemas will be different and the relevant attributes will be different (for one type of product, color may be important while for another product, size is important). Third, if the supplier changes their XML format or adds new properties, you have to update your object model and do it all over again.

With xDB, you don’t have to do any of this planning or object modeling. xDB can handle any arbitrary XML format, so you just import your document when you receive it from the supplier. And it doesn’t need to be chunked into smaller files, because xDB can return XML fragments when you query it. In effect, you can ask xDB to return you a list of all the products of type “Shoe” where size is “11″ and color is “Black”, and xDB will return a collection of XML fragments, one for each product element that matches that criteria. No chunking or attribute population is required, and there’s no database design involved, either, because xDB does not need any up-front knowledge of the XML schemas you plan to use. Just import your documents and xDB does the rest.

It turns out that xDB is very fast, very scalable, and has very high performance. It’s fast to import documents into it, and it’s fast to query it. I saw a demo today where xDB processed thousands of documents a second on some crappy laptop hardware. Some say that xDB is faster and better than a relational database, not only for hierarchical XML data (which it certainly is), but also for normal structured data. I’m beginning to think that those people may be right.

EMC has decided to make xDB a huge part of its technology strategy, and xDB is now being integrated and embedded in several applications.

• As Part of the Content Server - In one of the first major architecture changes to the Content Server since the introduction of the Method Server, Documentum will now contain an embedded instance of xDB where XML documents will be stored. You’ll be able to combine DQL and XQuery to get access from within Documentum to the features I described above. This is a big deal.
• As Part of Enterprise Search Services (ESS) - Documentum is replacing the FAST full-text engine with ESS, and ESS is powered by xDB. You heard me right. For the past several months, they have been adding full-text capabilities to xDB (leveraging Lucene, an open source search engine), and in an upcoming release of Documentum, the embedded full-text engine will be xDB.
• As Part of Dynamic Delivery Services (DDS) - DDS is a new product built on top of Interactive Delivery Services (IDS). It allows you to publish your web content into xDB and then query it from your web site. Intel is using this to run their entire Intel.com web site, and I can see how something like this would add lots of power to our web content management solutions while actually simplifying the solution.

Tomorrow is the last day of the conference, and I’m only planning on attending two sessions before I head off to the airport:

• THURSDAY 8:30 - Customer Experience – Web 2.0 and Personalized Customer Communications Product Overview and Strategies
• THURSDAY 10:00 - CMIS - Changing the World One Application at a Time

EMC World 2009 - Day 3 Recap and Day 4 Plans

Today was WCM/DAM day for me here at EMC World. I attended two WCM-related sessions and spent some time down in the Exhibition Hall with the DAM team. Overall, what I learned is good news for marketing teams.

EMC is targeting marketing teams by investing in two of its solution suites: the Web Content Management suite of products and the Digital Asset Management suite of products. The biggest investment, and the most impressive results, seem to have come on the DAM side with big improvements to Media Workspace, EMC’s next generation DAM client.

Media Workspace was released last year as a simple client for image browsing and annotation. Developed using the FLEX platform, Media Workspace provided a glimpse into EMC’s future direction in rich web-based clients with a Web 2.0 feel. We evaluated Media Workspace earlier this year, and frankly, it left us scratching our heads. The product didn’t seem complete - it had a very limited set of features, and we couldn’t think of a single real-world scenario where Media Workspace was a better choice than Digital Asset Manager.

Well, I’m happy to report that all that has changed. In my opinion, the previous version of Media Workspace was released a bit prematurely, but the new version that I saw today looks a thousand times better.

The new version of Media Workspace is a fairly full-featured DAM client. In addition to supporting images (as the previous version did), this version also supports video. It has support for workflows, collections, thumbnails, transformations, ratings, annotations, and all the expected library services (checkin/checkout). I can see how a marketing team could use the product to handle most of their digital asset management use cases, and I think the product really shines if you are managing video. There’s even a built-in video viewer so that you can preview a video before downloading the high-res rendition. The overall user interface is improved as well - this version seems a little more polished than the previous version, and I was told that this is one of the advantages of using FLEX - it’s easier to update the user interface than it has been with WDK.

So what will become of Digital Asset Manager? It is still required for all the DAM-related administrative use cases, such as setting up transformation rules, and there are probably some power-user use cases where DAM is better than Media Workspace. But it appears that EMC’s vision is that most marketing users will spend their time in Media Workspace.

The Web Content Management products have seen similar improvements. EMC is releasing a new version of the Contributor UI, a simple client aimed at content authors and reviewers. Like Media Workspace, the new Contributor UI has been developed using the FLEX framework and has a completely new user experience and look and feel. This is a brand new application. Pagebuilder has also seen improvements, and there’s a new FLEX-based Web Publisher Editor. The Web Publisher Editor is the form that authors fill out to create a piece of content. It’s previously been a Java Applet, and many people find it difficult to use. The new editor has two interesting new features:

• A template form can now have multiple tabs, so that instead of the super long form that was required in previous versions, developers can group form fields together on tabs, giving a sort of wizard-like authoring experience. One big advantage of this is that if your page is laid out in “blocks”, you can group all the fields for one of those blocks together on their own tab.
• A template form can now be laid out horizontally as well as vertically. This means that you can have fields side by side, saving space over the previous version that forced fields to be stacked on top of each other in an endless list.

You’ll be able to call the new editor from within the new Contributor UI, the standard Web Publisher client, and Pagebuilder. All this will be available in version 6.5 SP3, which is scheduled for Q1 2010.

Other improvements have been made to the WCM Edition’s publishing capabilities. Site Caching Services (SCS) and Site Delivery Services (SDS) have been renamed and enhanced. The new product, called Interactive Delivery Services (IDS), includes an XML datastore in addition to the relational database that SCS has always provided. Based on the X-Hive product acquired in 2007, this XML datastore provides new options for delivering content to your web properties. Another new feature of IDS is the ability to take user-generated content from your web site (such as ratings or comments) and ingest them back into the Documentum repository. This is done by first writing them into IDS which will then write them into Documentum.

Perhaps the most anticipated improvement that comes with IDS is a completely new architecture for delivering content to a cluster of web servers. SDS has given administrators fits for years, and I can already hear people rejoicing that there is a replacement.

Tomorrow, I’m planning on attending these sessions:

• WEDNESDAY 8:00 - Beyond EMC Documentum 6.5 - A Product Roadmap
• WEDNESDAY 9:30 - EMC Documentum CenterStage - A Technical Review
• WEDNESDAY 11:00 - Best Practices for Moving WDK Customizations to EMC Documentum CenterStage and/or Next-Generation Documentum
• WEDNESDAY 2:45 - Smarten Up Your Content with EMC Documentum XML
• WEDNESDAY 4:15 - Best Practices for EMC Documentum xDB and XML Dynamic Delivery Services