Blue Fish Development Group
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May 21, 2009
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:
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.
May 20, 2009
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.
Tomorrow is the last day of the conference, and I’m only planning on attending two sessions before I head off to the airport:
May 19, 2009
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:
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:
May 18, 2009
EMC World 2009 - Day 2 Thoughts and Day 3 Plans
Today was the first full day of EMC World 2009. As I mentioned earlier, EMC has indeed grouped the Documentum-related topics and partners together, and I think they have successfully pulled off the conference in a conference. I talked to Whitney Tidmarsh, Chief Marketing Officer of EMC’s Content Management and Archiving Division, and an old friend (I actually trained her on Documentum when she first joined the company 14 years ago). Whitney told me that the “buying affinity” of EMC’s CMA customers was different from that of its hardware customers, and that they finally realized it was best to separate the CMA sessions from the rest of the conference. The best part is that they are calling the conference within a conference “Momentum”, which is the name of the old Documentum User Group conference before they were acquired by EMC.
I have to admit that pulling out the Documentum sessions into a little Momentum conference has made a HUGE difference. Whitney told me that there’s about 800 CMA attendees this year, so that means that only about 11% of the attendees are Documentum focused. You can start to see how we feel a little underappreciated and overwhelmed in the midst of 6,200 hardware focused attendees.
Overall, the sessions I attended today were decent. I didn’t get to attend most of the ones I targeted due to space limitations. All four of the sessions I wanted to attend had crowds flowing out the door, and I only made it inside the room for two of them. For the other two, I attended my second choice sessions, which were fine.
The best session of the day was John McCormick’s presentation on Collaborative Technologies. John is another old friend of mine, and he’s the GM of Knowledge Worker products, which (if I understand correctly) covers WebTop, CenterStage, and My Documentum. John covered each of these in his presentation, and he’s so freaking smart and knowledgeable that it’s a real pleasure to see him present. The biggest discovery for me today was about My Documentum, which is a rebranding and upgrade of some existing Documentum applications.
My Documentum has three components:
There’s a huge push around CenterStage, Documentum’s new collaboration application launched last year. This application breaks away from the WDK model and employs a FLEX-based development framework. EMC claims that their customers were asking for a more Web 2.0 experience, and the CMA group responded by developing a new set of applications using the FLEX framework from Adobe. I’m not convinced that this is the best decision, because most Web 2.0 applications are actually HTML and AJAX based, and I’m sort of tired of EMC changing the development environment every few years. I’m also worried about how anyone is ever going to effectively customize it. But that’s probably a point of view best elaborated on in a future post.
CenterStage is breaking some new ground for Documentum, and probably the biggest thing from my perspective is the addition of faceted search refinement. Blue Fish has been adding Faceted Search Refinement to our Documentum solutions for over 4 years, and I think it makes a huge improvement in usability. You can learn more about what Faceted Search Refinement is by watching a webinar that we recorded with Endeca last year.
The other big push is for SourceOne, EMC’s new Archiving and Records Management suite. I hope to learn more about that later in the week.
Tomorrow, I plan on attending the following sessions. We’ll see if I get into any of them. 
May 18, 2009
EMC World 2009 - Day 1 Recap and Day 2 Plan
I arrived in Orlando last night for the kickoff of EMC World, the big EMC User’s Conference. EMC tells us that 7,000 people will be attending the conference this year, which is mostly focused on storage technology but also has a healthy amount of attention paid to enterprise content management. This year, I’m told that there will be a content management “conference in a conference” which amounts to grouping all the content managment sessions together in the same part of the convention center and grouping all the content management vendors together in the same part of the exhibitor’s hall. The portion of EMC’s customers that are Documentum-focused have been complaining for the past few years that they get lost in the massive hardware focus that is EMC’s primary business, so I’ll let you know if the conference in a conference works well this year.
When I checked in last night, I was immediately struck by the demographics of the attendees. They are probably 90%-95% male (more skewed than other IT conferences I’ve been to), aged 25-45, and without a lot of racial diversity. What is it about computer storage that attracts white dudes in their 30s?
Last night’s event was a concert by the Gin Blossoms. This is a band I know well but haven’t seen play live before. When I was in college, my band aspired to be just like the Gin Blossoms, and their album New Miserable Experience was in heavy rotation in my dorm room. I’m a sucker for a great pop-rock song with catchy melodies and harmony vocals, and that’s the Gin Blossom’s bread and butter. It was nice to see them play live, but you could tell that their hearts weren’t in it. Playing for a convention full of IT geeks that are primarily there for the free buffet is a long way from the club full of rabid fans they are used to. The lead singer tried to get the crowd engaged, but the energy was way off. In a normal gig, even if you are playing to only 100 people, it’s 100 people that stood in line to see you, and the energy of the room reflects that. Last night, there were 2,000 - 3,000 people at the event, but they were just there for something to do, and it showed in the vibe of the crowd.
I’m about to head out to the morning sessions. I’m planning to attend the following, so if you read this and want to find me, you’ll know where to look. My Monday is going to be all about understanding EMC’s current “pitch”. I’m pretty up to date on the technologies below, but I’m always interested in how EMC is packaging them and presenting them to the market.
March 3, 2009
Pete Nevin, one of our migration experts, just published an article that explores some of the innovative ways our clients have been using Migration Workbench. Although Migration Workbench was designed for content migrations, folks have been using it to archive documents, synchronize repositories, integrate Documentum with SharePoint, and perform a variety of other system administration and integration tasks.
Learn more by reading Using Migration Workbench for More than Migrations.
March 3, 2009
Nichole DuBose recently published a technical overview of the Architecture of Documentum’s Web Publisher solution. When you deploy Web Publisher, it’s surprising how many components you need to set up and configure. There are databases, multiple application servers and web servers, and several pieces of Documentum software that have specialized purposes. Nicki’s article does a great job of explaining all these pieces and how they fit together.
December 24, 2008
Marc Perlman, a consultant here at Blue Fish that specializes in web content management solutions, has just written an article full of tips on how to make your web site accessible for visitors with a visual disability.
December 24, 2008
Jason Duke is one of the developers who helped Documentum add drag-and-drop capabilities to WebTop back in version 5.3. Since then, he’s worked on several WDK development projects for some of our largest clients. Jason has just published an article about the WDK Combo Container, one of the trickiest components to customize in the entire WDK library (for the uninitiated, the Combo Container is the control that enables users to select multiple documents at once and then perform an action on them).
Jason’s article is called Introduction to the WDK Combo Container, and it’s worth a read if you’re going to be doing any serious WDK development.
December 13, 2008
Have you ever had a Documentum end-user ask you to check on a document because they launched it on a workflow and no one seems to have it in their inbox? Often when this happens, it’s because the workflow had an error along the way and is stuck in a paused state, requiring an administrator to manually intervene and resume the workflow. If your Documentum administrators are as busy as the ones I know, the last thing they have time for is baby sitting workflows.
Jamie Balling, one of the Technical Leads here at Blue Fish, developed an application that automatically detects paused workflows and automatically resumes them, freeing up the support team to focus on real fires. He just wrote a great article that describes the program, complete with sample code.
Learn more by reading Resilient Documentum Workflow Integration with Automated Recovery.
