Blue Fish Development Group
701 Brazos St. #700
Austin, TX 78701
(512) 469-9300
May 10, 2010
It’s the middle of the first day of EMC World. Here are my thoughts so far.
The division within EMC that owns Documentum has changed their name from Content Management and Archiving to “Information Intelligence Group”. Not sure what this is about yet - I guess I’ll find out over the course of the conference.
Momentum is the name of the old Documentum user group conference, and it’s also the name of EMC World’s “conference within a conference” that is focused on Documentum and the related content management technologies.
There are only 16 breakout sessions on Documentum today, and most are delivered by EMC product managers. Only three sessions today are being presented by customers.
The “Momentum Zone” at the solutions pavilion is tiny. There are probably less than 20 booths total, and only a handful of them are names I recognize from previous conferences. Blue Fish, Technology Services Group, and many other Documentum-focused partners that have had booths in the past elected not to exhibit this year.
I’m totally bummed out that I couldn’t get into John McCormack’s presentation on the Documentum roadmap. I guess I’m going to have to download the slides when they are available, but it’s not the same.
From my perspective, EMC World is a conference about Documentum. Of course, that’s only one percent of what’s going on here, but it’s the one percent that I care about. But I listened to Joe Tucci’s keynote anyway to here his vision for the future of EMC.
EMC is pushing something they call the “Private Cloud”, EMC’s vision for operating a cloud model within your own data center. The idea is that with vmWare and other EMC technologies, you’ll be able to provision new computing services in your own datacenter in a manner similar to the way that Amazon, Google, Facebook, and other massive online companies do. Instead of having infrastructure dedicated to an application the way we do today, you’ll have a slew of generic computing resources (CPU, memory, bandwidth, and storage) that can seamlessly provision themselves as demand for them increases and then release resources into a common pool as demand falls off.
I attended Matt Coblenz’s presentation on CenterStage, EMC’s replacement for eroom. I had heard the CenterStage pitch in past years, and was excited to learn more about what exciting changes have been introduced over the past year. It turns out, not much is new. CenterStage was a big topic at last year’s EMC World, but it wasn’t officially released until about six months ago. As Matt presented some of his thoughts about the future, one of the audience members put him on the spot.
“Your product is nearly two years late, how can I trust your roadmap and vision?” the audience member asked. Matt handled it as well as he could, saying, “You won’t until I earn your trust again. We haven’t done a good job of meeting commitments in the past, but we are trying harder.”
So the bottom line is that nothing much is new to report about CenterStage.
April 15, 2010
Lisa Hill has just published a great article on how to customize the Rich Text Editor in Documentum Web Publisher. The Rich Text Editor is the WYSIWYG editor that is used by web page authors and editors to create content for web sites being managed by Documentum. The editor functions like Microsoft Word and lets you style your text (bold, underline, etc.), add tables, create bulleted lists and things like that.
From time to time, we get requests from our clients to customize this editor. Some want us to add extra toolbar buttons that provide some custom capability. Others want us to make the style of the editor match the style of their web site to give an even better preview of what the content will look like.
Lisa’s article shows how to do all of these things and provides some great tips on how to debug and troubleshoot your customizations. If you are thinking of modifying the Web Publisher Rich Text Editor, this article is a must read.
April 6, 2010
Josh McJilton, one of the Project Managers here at Blue Fish, has just written an article on how to make Dashlets in Alfresco Share configurable. Dashlets are like portlets or widgets that users can include on various pages in Alfresco Share (Alfresco’s collaboration system). Typical dashlets might be document-oriented (like showing a real-time list of changes to your team’s documents) or they might pull data from some external system (like showing the weather in your favorite city).
To be useful, most dashlets neet to be configurable by the end user. For example, you might want to select which team’s documents to monitor or which city’s weather to display. Dashlets themselves are pretty easy to create (it only takes a little JavaScript and some XML files), but if you want your dashlet to be configurable, it can get a little tricky.
Josh explains it all in Making Alfresco Share Dashlets Configurable.
April 5, 2010
Blue Fish and Alfresco are hosting a Lunch and Learn to show folks some of the cool new features coming out in Alfresco 3.3 later this month. If you live in Texas, we’d love to see you.
The event will preview Alfresco 3.3, the latest release from the leading open source ECM provider. We’re hosting this two-hour session in five Texas cities, so hopefully you can find one to attend. All sessions run from 11:00 – 1:00 and lunch will be provided.
Register for all Lunch and Learns on the Alfresco web site.
This session going to be great for CIOs, IT Managers, or anyone else considering Alfresco for an ECM initiative. During the event, we’ll cover the following topics:
Space is limited, so please register early to secure your place.
I hope to see you there.
March 29, 2010
At Blue Fish, most of our business is related to either Documentum or Alfresco. Our clients that use Documentum are all companies you recognize – Wells Fargo, Southwest Airlines, Bausch + Lomb. Many of our clients that use Alfresco are great companies that you may not have heard of before - American Bureau of Shipping, Nanston Dental Group, Drilling Info.
Why is that?
The answer is that Alfresco is bringing the benefits of Enterprise Content Management to companies that don’t have millions of dollars to spend on ECM solutions. It’s also bringing ECM to smaller business problems that can’t justify big money to solve them.
Alfresco is a disruptive force in the ECM industry, similar to the way that SalesForce.com disrupted traditional CRM vendors like Seibel. Let’s look at how the two compare.
At Blue Fish, we use SalesForce, and we would never in a million years use Seibel. For a sales team of only 2 people, it’s just not worth it. But SalesForce gives us a world-class CRM solution for a price that we can afford. SalesForce isn’t just for small shops, either. Dell uses SalesForce, and they have one of the largest sales teams in the world. That’s true disruption, and it all but put Seibel out of business.
SalesForce did this by using a SaaS business model to dramatically lower the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of CRM solutions.
Now, SalesForce’s customers don’t care about the cloud, SaaS, or any of that business model stuff – they just want it to be cheap. It is, and that changed the world of CRM.
Alfresco is doing something similar in the world of ECM. They are going about it differently, but they are shooting for the same result. Alfresco uses an open source model that lets their customers try before they buy and do so without ever talking to a sales rep. Eventually, companies who rely on Alfresco for their critical business data will want to buy an Enterprise subscription with a support agreement, and that’s how Alfresco makes their money.
But that’s not really disruptive (it’s a clever marketing strategy, but it’s not truly disruptive). What’s disruptive is the price of their Enterprise license – it’s dirt cheap. You can get a fully supported version of Alfresco that can support hundreds of users for less than $20,000 a year. Compare that to the traditional players like EMC and IBM who would charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for a similar solution, and you start to see what I’m talking about.
Alfresco is also cheaper and easier to operate and maintain than traditional ECM solutions. Because of its open source heritage, it can operate on an open source stack, with open source operating systems, databases, and application servers. That reduces the cost of the infrastructure required to run it.
And Alfresco is easier to implement and extend. Because it has come to market recently, it uses modern application development and deployment technologies. Alfresco runs in a Java application server, so you don’t have to learn new deployment or monitoring procedures. Developers extend it using web services and lightweight web scripts, which are easier to learn. And most importantly, you have access to the source code (even for the Enterprise Edition), so it’s a thousand times easier to find a defect and fix it or to follow Alfresco’s patterns when developing your own extensions.
There are places where the big traditional ECM players still make sense. If you want to run your ECM solution on a mainframe, IBM is the only game in town. If you are a pharmaceutical company with regulated content, Documentum is the strongest bet. If you’ve standardized on Microsoft throughout the company, SharePoint might be for you.
But if you are looking for the best value – a full-featured ECM solution that won’t break the bank, Alfresco is the best bet.
As a result, companies that never considered ECM solutions are looking at them for the first time.
February 23, 2010
Alfresco has just released a new version with some improvements on the WCM side of the house. The version is 3.2r, a dot-release (sort of) that adds additional features to the 3.2 release.
I’m most excited about the improvements to Share. We’ve been using Share a lot lately, and it’s becoming my preferred UI for WCM projects as well as DM projects. It’s evolving quickly, and I love it when they release a new version.
You can download a trial version here: http://www2.alfresco.com/e/1234/ry/GIEWE/177864364.
February 19, 2010
Yesterday, I presented a webinar with Josh Toub describing how we have customized Alfresco Share to streamline the content creation process for web sites. Josh leads our Alfresco team here at Blue Fish, and he’s created a really great solution that fills in some gaps in Alfresco’s WCM offering. Some of the features included in the demo are:
You can see a recorded version of the webinar here: Making Web Content Easy with Alfresco Share 3.2.
February 18, 2010
Big news out of EMC this week. They have purchased a large stake in FatWire, a competing Web Content Management company. Even bigger news is that Documentum Web Publisher, EMC’s web content management solution, is being replaced by FatWire’s “Web Experience Management” (WEM) solution.
The deal looks like this: FatWire will resell EMC’s digital asset management software, and EMC will resell FatWire’s WCM software.
FatWire is the largest independent WCM (or as they like to be called, WEM) software vendor. They have over 500 enterprise accounts and 200 employees. Most analysts consider FatWire to be one of the best solutions for WCM/WEM. So they have a lot of credibility behind them.
The FatWire solution is much more holistic than Web Publisher. While Web Publisher is focused only on the creation, approval, and management of web content, FatWire also focuses on delivery and presentation of that content to end users (web site visitors). With FatWire, you get a much more sophisticated solution “out of the box”, while getting the same types of features with a Web Publisher-driven solution would require thousands of hours of development effort from your web team.
Here are some of the features FatWire has that will be new to Web Publisher owners:
FatWire has its own architecture, repository, and technology stack that differ from Documentum’s, so it breaks Documentum’s vision of a single integrated repository for all enterprise content. And since EMC didn’t fully acquire FatWire, there are no plans to replace the FatWire repository with the Documentum repository.
However, FatWire does have an integration with Documentum that will synchronize content from Documentum into FatWire. When you make a change to the content in Documentum, it will automatically update in FatWire (and on your web site), or optionally launch a FatWire workflow to be approved before it goes live. The main use case I see for this is the ability to embed into your FatWire web pages the digital assets (videos, etc.) that are stored in Documentum’s Digital Asset Management solution.
Later this year, there will be an integration that goes the other way, allowing FatWire content to be replicated into Documentum as well.
Peggy Ringhausen, an old friend of mine and the WCM product manager at EMC, says that the new FatWire solution is the wave of the future and that they will be retiring Web Publisher, Page Builder, and the other products in the WCM product line. No date has been announced for this, but it probably won’t happen for at least three years.
EMC says they have some licensing deals that allow existing Web Publisher owners to get their hands on the new FatWire solution, but you shouldn’t expect it to be a free upgrade.
It will be interesting to see how existing Web Publisher owners react to this news. On the one hand, their existing investment is in jeopardy, but on the other hand, the replacement seems like a much stronger solution.
February 3, 2010
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.
January 7, 2010
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:
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.
