What is EMC Technical Architect?

Laurence Hart of Word of Pie talked about the EMC certification for a Technical Architect about a month ago.  He was concerned that the focus of Technical Architect exam was going to be focused around hardware and not software solution.  I too was concerned, but until the Job Task Analysis was held, we could only guess what the outcome would be.  Well, that workshop was held in the beginning of August and here is what the exam is going to cover:

• Migration and Upgrades
• Business Continuity
• Scalability
• Performance and Testing
• Security
• Capacity Planning
• Support Operations
• Infrastructure Integration
• Enterprise Architecture
• Application Design

I would say that our concerns were justified.   The exam is geared towards certifying candidates so that they are able to “…prepare the technical architecture of an enterprise content management solution.“  Notice that its not focused on certifying candidates to “build” enterprise content management solutions.

The only saving grace is that Technical Architect exam is a Specialist-level exam.  It is being created on a separate track from the Application Developer (EMCApD) and System Administrator (EMCSyA).  IMHO, this exam is geared towards infrastructure specialist/architect.  These folks are needed as soon as an enterprise project starts.  I have been seen many projects falter because the infrastructure was not set up correctly.

So, EMC now has (will have) certifications for setting up infrastructure, administering servers, and programming in DFC or WDK.  Is this enough to build an enterprise content management solution?  I think not.  I strongly believe that there needs to be a certification for “solution architect”.  Someone who has EMCApD can develop an application given a set of requirements and/or design document.  For an enterprise project, who is responsible for creating the design document -> solution architect.

Forms Builder – building block for the future?

At EMC World 2007, EMC Documentum released a new product called TaskSpace that is designed to provide a highly configurable UI for transaction-based processes. I havent used TaskSpace yet, but I have used Forms Builder, which is the primary tool to create UI for TaskSpace.

For those of you who havent used Forms Builder, its a nice alternative to WDK layout of attributes. Forms Builder supports the creation of tabs, the grouping of attributes, placement of attributes horizontally (as well as vertically), dynamic visibility, dynamic enabling/disabling, and much more. The form paradigm makes sense if you are building an application to collect structured data from a user.

What it doesnt do (at least in the current version), is dynamic support for making an attribute required, disabling of validation till form submission, and the most critical issue is support for versioning of the form template.

Forms Builder allows you to define custom xml schema to store information collected in the form. Forms Builder editor then allows you to define UI controls to map to the xml schema. This works great until you want to add new controls (and new xml tags) to existing form template. Since existing form instances do not have new xml tags, you get xsd validation errors when trying to edit the form (and thereby load the new form UI template against the old xml schema). The only way to get around this is to manually update the existing xml content and insert the new xml tags.

Hopefully, this problem will get resolved with D6. Otherwise, I foresee a short-lived future for these products. It seems silly that the product managers did not consider that customers would want to eventually version their form templates.