It’s The End Of The World As We Know It…

The EMC Support Forums in its current incarnation under Powerlink will be no more after this weekend. As part of bringing the vast wealth of knowledge under the EMC Community Network, the Support Forums will be migrated to a secure section of ECN. Unfortunately, only current customers, partners and employees with Powerlink accounts will have access to this section of the ECN.

I believe the Support Forums was started back in 2002-2003. I remember going to first ever Documentum Developer’s conference and chatting with Nancy Garrity about the need to create an online community for us developers to exchange questions and answers. Sure enough, our voices were heard back then and the Documentum (before EMC acquisition) Support Forums were created. For me personally, this was a monumental event in that no longer were customers and developers required to contact Tech Support to get a simple question answered. While it took awhile for questions to get answered early on, today, a large majority of questions get responded to within a day or two. This can be directly attributed to the size of the community and their commitment to sharing their knowledge with others.

There was/is a Documentum discussion board on Yahoo Groups that people could post to, but I didnt feel that this was a true community. The Documentum Yahoo Group was not officially supported by Documentum, so rarely did any employee contribute. With the advent of the Support Forums, Documentum employees were encourage to contribute the community. With their involvement, the knowledge base grew with the addition of Support Notes and Technical Advisories. Obviously, as the amount of content grew, the need to find relevant information grew as well. The search engine powering the Support Forums was horrendous in the first few years. But, this issue has been fixed within the past few years. You can see this in the forums, but the amount of cross-referencing past posts to answer current questions.

The new home of the Support Forums in the ECN will be a welcome change. The ECN is powered by a new platform that supports tagging, RSS feeds, direct postings using smartphones, and many other Web 2.0 features. The change makes sense and the consolidation will reduce the confusion on where questions should be posted -> Support Forums or ECN/EDN.

BTW – … I Feel Fine and here’s my last tribute to Support Forums.

The Tax Man Just Doesnt Get It

I normally dont blog about news articles that I read in my local local newspaper, but this article by Dina ElBoghdady in the Washington Post infuriated me: “Costly fraud and error reported in home buyers’ tax program – IRS HAMSTRUNG BY LIMITATIONS Lawmakers consider extension”

This article talks about crooks taking advantage of the $8,000 credit for new home buyers. I know that there will always be crooks in our society, but thats not whats bugging me. The article details a report recently put out by the Treasury inspector general for tax administration. In the report, it states that about $500 million dollars have been wrong fully claimed by over 74,000 buyers. The article goes on to say that these crooks went as far to have their children claim the house credit – the youngest being 4 years old.

Here’s the kicker of the article, when inspector general approached the IRS about not catching this fraud and requiring buyers to attach documentation (to prove the credit applies), the IRS said that the agency “…does not have the ability to accept such documents electronically, nor does it have the legal authority to disallow a claim if the documents are not attached.” Are you kidding me?

I know for a fact that IRS has one of the largest Documentum practice in DC area. Whats the bottleneck in accepting documents? Worst case scenario, have people mail in documentation. We all know that IRS still accepts returns in paper and some of that paperwork must be scanned and OCR’d.

I also know personally that the IRS tracks who buys and sells property. When I purchased my house, I had to fill out a IRS form that contain my SSN and the property address. I’m pretty sure that the IRS also has my birth date associated with my SSN. So, is it that hard to compare my birth date associated with SSN to make sure that I’m old enough to buy a house. Also, if the IRS is tracking large cash flow transactions, it should be able to track whether I have spent a lot of money within last few years.

Even if the IRS does not have the ability to disallow the claim, cant it put those questionable returns in review bucket and flag those people to be audited? If you let someone get away with this kind of fraud today, I’m willing to bet that they will find other ways to commit fraud on their tax returns in the future. I dont mind paying taxes, but I’m frustrated that this money is going to crooks. I’m even more furious that this problem can be stopped if the IRS just put some smart people who understand technology and how to implement an efficient/repeatable process in a room and have them solve the problem. I’m pretty sure they can solve this loop hole without having to spend $500 million dollars. Imagine what the ROI would be if the solution cost $5 million. Even if the project cost $50 million, the ROI is still ten-fold!

People, Places, and Purpose – The Evolution of ECM Search

While reviewing a new book on Solr, an open-source enterprise search engine, it occurred to me that Google has not completely conquered the search world. To achieve high accuracy/relevance in search results, content needs to be parsed and indexed in a way to uniquely identify a document. Otherwise, you could end up with hundreds or even thousands of matches based on a generic search criterion. Additional tagging may be employed to the index via taxonomy and auto-tagging tool to enhance search results. However, this approach requires a detail taxonomy that is appropriate for your enterprise.

For the purpose of this discussion, let’s assume that I work for a large fictitious company and have been asked to create a training course for a new application. I want to find examples of all the typical materials that are created for a training course: course outline, PowerPoint presentation template, and lab exercises. If I try to search using these key words, I probably won’t find anything useful because the search criterion is very generic. What I need is the ability to search for: “need to create training materials”.

In my fictitious company, I do not have a training department that I can go ask someone directly for this information nor is there a corporate intranet or central repository that has these templates available. So how do find this information and how does this fit with people, places, and purpose?

I believe what is missing from enterprise search (specifically on the indexing side of the equation), is the context of how content is created. We have already conquered the issue of “places” (or sources) by the creation and support for federated searches from various ECM vendors. No longer are we tied to searching a single global repository or from a single vendor. Also, most ECM repositories have some security in place that is adhered to when providing access to federated search.

The only issue with security IS the actual management of security. Here lies the “people” challenge. For most applications, we can define security groups and assign users to the appropriate groups. This kind of authorization is done at the application level. You can extend the authorization model to multiple applications by creating global groups (e.g. Documentum Federation). The challenge becomes mapping the authorization from vendor to another. Try to map SharePoint security with Documentum security at an enterprise level. “People” challenge will eventually get solved when application designers get comfortable with the idea of roles (vs. groups) from a security perspective.

So how does “purpose” fit in with searching? Purpose is similar to tagging, but a more user friendly way. I see the association of a purpose with content creation as the means to bring context to search results.

Let’s look at this from a content creator perspective in my fictitious company before we address how this would affect searching. If I was creating training material from scratch, I would create a space/site to gather and store (possibly creating federated links to documents existing outside of this space) all of the relevant information that would help generate new training material content. As part of the “purpose” of this space, I would indicate that I was “creating training materials for application X”. This purpose would be associated with all content created in this repository. The relationship would not necessarily be added to the index, but could be created in some global relationship database that is integrated with enterprise search engine.

Imagine now when a user is searching for something generic, he/she also has the ability to filter (or constrain) the search criteria based on the purpose of the search. I think the technology is already out there from auto-tagging/taxonomy perspective. The only thing missing is automating the assignment of “purpose” during content creation. Purpose must exist across the enterprise in all forms (e.g documents, images, emails, movies, etc) in order for the feature to be useful. I’m not sure if Solr will support this, but since its open-source, I can definitely look into whether I can integrate this into the search engine.