Out of the Blue - Michael Trafton's Blog

Cory Lowder, one of our Migration Engineers, just published an article about how to plan for a content migration project. One of the things we’ve discovered over the years is that the hard part of migrating content into a content management system is dealing with all the data associated with the content (the metadata, file properties, classifications, folder paths, relationships, etc.). Cory has some great information about what to expect and how to plan for dealing with the inevitable complications that you will encounter during your migration project.

Read more in Planning for the Data Migration that’s Lurking in Your Content Migration.

One of our consultants, Nicki DuBose, just published an article about Web Publishing Jobs in Documentum. Jobs are administrative tasks that run at various times to clean up log files, publish content, delete orphaned content and things like that. Jobs are surprisingly hard to figure out when you’re just getting started, and Nicki does a great job of explaining all the settings and how to configure them. She also explains which jobs are the most important and offers recommendations for how frequently they should be scheduled to run.

Read more at An Introduction to Web Publishing Jobs in Documentum.

Last week, wecompleted a four-part Webinar series highlighting some of our recent Information Access projects with organizations like Dell, the University of Leeds, and the federal government. If you’re wondering what information access is all about, we’ve got recordings of these webinars online.

One of the webinars features yours truly giving a demonstration of FishFinder, the internal search application we use here at Blue Fish to discover and access important project-related documentation. FishFinder uses the Endeca platform to index all the documents in our Documentum content management system, and because it’s blindingly fast, gives our consultants near instant access to best practices, sample code, and other information that has been used on previous projects. This makes our teams more effective since they are not reinventing the wheel, and it allows us to complete our projects more quickly and with less risk.

If you’d like to know more about any of the solutions featured in these webinars, drop me a line (mikey at bluefishgroup.com).

I may have to eat a little bit of crow here. Recently, I made a point that Google Search Appliance (GSA) wasn’t very innovative, and therefore wasn’t very “Googely”. I still stand by the core of my opinion, which has to do with the way that Google presents search results. Because it can’t leverage the PageRank algorithm that they use on google.com, the search appliance is left to use the same relevance algorithms that other search engines use - noting the frequency and placement of the search term within the document and using that to determine how relevant the document is for the current search.

But there is more innovation in the Google Search Appliance than I thought there was. Dan Burton, a consultant here at Blue Fish, recently wrote an overview of the Google Search Appliance, and I learned a few things I didn’t previously know. One innovative technique they use is called KeyMatch, and it allows certain users to promote or highlight key content for a given search term. Similar to the way that Google Ads work on google.com, KeyMatch lets a user with the right permissions highlight a document, moving it to the top of the search results. If used correctly, KeyMatch can help companies satisfy their user’s most frequent searches by manually placing the most relevant result where they will easily see it. That’s pretty Googley.

The team has been busy lately, cooking up a tasty new batch of articles. These articles cover a range of topics from nuts and bolts programming with Documentum lifecycles and search APIs to guidance on how to deploy enterprise technology across multiple business units. There are also a couple of articles about search and information access - one is on Google’s Enterprise Search Appliance and the other is about simplifying the deployment of Endeca’s information access platform.

• DFC Search in Depth - Aaron has written a great article that explains how to use the DFC search APIs to query Documentum and process the results.
• Google Enterprise Search Appliance Overview - This article covers the features of Google’s search appliance and how it compares to other solutions on the market.
• Custom Java Lifecycle Modules - Explains how to insert custom business logic into Documentum lifecycle state transitions.
• Initiating an IM Program Across Multiple Business Units - Bryant explains how he’s been successful in the past when he’s had to deploy enterprise software across multiple business units or divisions.
• Simplifying Endeca Deployments with the Deployment Template - Until recently, deploying Endeca has been a bit of a black art. Learn how to make Endeca deployments easier with deployment templates.

The Blue Fish offices will be closed for the next few days. The entire company (more than 60 people when you include spouses and guests) is flying to Cabo San Lucas to celebrate a strong 2007 and enjoy some well-deserved rest and relaxation.

If you’re a top-notch consultant, software developer, or project manager who wants to work for a company that truly appreciates you, check out the positions we have open on our Careers page.

Last week, I gave a presentation at the Wachovia Services Summit, a conference full of Wachovia Bank branch managers that had come together to learn how other companies differentiate themselves through customer service. I was invited to speak about some of the client-focused practices we use here at Blue Fish. I was speaking alongside representatives from Nordstrom, Whole Foods, and Four Seasons Hotels, all of whom are famous for their great customer service, and I was honored to be included amongst such heavy hitters.

My presentation talked about the things Blue Fish has done to build what I call a Client Service Culture — an environment where we put our clients first and try to go out of our way to make them happy. It’s always fun to tell our story to people who have never heard it before. We’ve been doing some of these things for so long, it doesn’t seem very unusual, but I was surprised at the feedback I received telling me how innovative we are being.

For example, the Wachovia bankers were shocked to learn that the typical candidate at Blue Fish is interviewed by eight different people (for some roles, it can be as many as eleven). We do this not only to get a variety of perspectives on the candidate, but also so that our candidates can meet as many of their potential coworkers as possible. Culture fit is a two-way street, and we want to make sure that our candidates meet enough people to get a good feel for our company’s personality. Of course, we don’t conduct eight separate interviews. We have a few people in what we call a panel interview, and we send a couple more to lunch with the candidate. But by the time all is said and done, our candidates have gotten to know us pretty well.

I think Wachovia is being pretty innovative as well. How many companies do you know of that have a conference for their managers that is focused exclusively on customer service? You can tell that they care about their customers and are committed to continuous improvement. Wachovia is one of the fastest growing banks in Texas, and it’s largely due to their focus on the customer.

The Austin Business Journal has a nice article about Blue Fish in their most recent issue. The photo of me is a little silly (it was the photographer’s idea, I promise), but overall I think the article captured the spirit of Blue Fish pretty well.

The reporter, a woman named Laura Hipp, interviewed me about how I feel about the plans Google and PayPal have for hiring a bunch of software developers here in Austin. I’m a little worried, of course, but I’m not freaking out about it. I’ve always felt that hiring was about getting a great fit between the employee and the company, and I’ll bet that the people who are the best fit for us might be a fish out of water at those other companies (no pun intended).

When you look closely, there are several differences between Blue Fish and typical software companies. First of all, our teams are fairly small. A typical project at Blue Fish is made up of 3 to 6 developers. Contrast that to PayPal where there are over 300 developers working on their core payment processing engine. And there is a lot of variety at Blue Fish - our projects typically last less than six months, so developers are more likely to work with several technologies over the course of a year. Of course, we also have some beefy, multi-year projects for the type of developer that likes to dig in and focus on one problem for a long period of time.

Another big difference is that because we build custom software solutions, our developers are more in touch with the users of the software. Most software developers get their marching orders from a product manager, but at Blue Fish, our developers get to meet their users in person and truly understand their needs. I think this is one of the things that really attracts people to Blue Fish, and it has more to do with a developer’s personality than it does his or her skills. Some developers want to focus purely on the technical aspects of a problem, but those that do best at Blue Fish want to understand the underlying business problem and use that knowledge to design a creative solution. Someone told me recently that Blue Fish was the first place he had worked where the software he wrote was actually used - his time at his previous jobs had been spent working on products that never made it to market.

Another way that Blue Fish is different from Google and PayPal is our size - with less than 50 employees, we are tiny in comparison. Developers work across the hall from our executives, and I think they are more “plugged-in” to how the company operates than employees at other firms. For example, we share our company financials with all employees once a month. Once a quarter, our managers and executives have a half-day, off-site meeting the technical project leads to answer concerns and work on improving issues that are important to them (we do the same thing with our project managers). We are able to incorporate the ideas of our employees into our strategies and corporate initiatives in a way that larger companies just can’t do.

So Google and PayPal can bring it on, as far as I’m concerned. Competition is good - it will push us even harder to keep Blue Fish a great place to work.

In our Information Access practice, we often find ourselves implementing Endeca to help our clients find documents and other information easily and intuitively. Some of our engagements involve massive amounts of data, and it can be challenging to architect a reliable, scalable architecture when you are dealing with millions of records and gigabytes of data.

Dan Burton, one of our Solution Architects, just published an article full of tips on how to deploy Endeca in environments that have huge datasets. Learn more by reading Architecting Endeca for Large Data Deployments.

Over the years at Blue Fish, we have helped lots of clients migrate documents and other data from file systems, databases, and legacy systems into the content management systems we help them design, develop, and deploy. We call these efforts “Content Migrations”, and we have an entire Content Migrations practice area devoted to helping our clients perform these migrations quickly and effectively.

“Why does Blue Fish need an entire practice focused on Content Migrations?” you may ask. After all, the concept seems pretty straightforward. But these migrations can be a lot harder than than they look. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve had clients budget a week or two for their migration only for it to remain incomplete months later.

Pete Nevin, one of the consultants in our Content Migrations practice, just published an article detailing some of the common pitfalls we see companies make when they try to tackle a migration. The article is called Technical Challenges Faced During Content Migrations, and it discusses the typical approach most people use when performing a content migration along with several things to watch out for in each step of the process.