My first impressions on new xCP xCelerators

I am currently involve in a opportunity that allowed me to evaluate the new Courts Case Management xCelerator (I will shorten this to CCM for brevity; this is by no means the official acronym for this).   First of all, CCM is NOT full functioning app like Grants Management xCelerator.  The Court Case xCelerator contains high level “design” docs for various components (eg workflow templates, BAM reporting, object model, and UI).  The object model and application roles for Court Case have been created and included in CCM DAR file.  However, that’s it from coding/configuration perspective.

I understand that it takes resources to build out an xCelerator, and that there are plenty of xCelerators that EMC customers have been asking for.  Why doesnt EMC let the community help build out the xCelerators?   There are plenty of developers who are interested in learning xCP and the best way to do this is provide an example or use case.  The CCM design docs are actually good enough to use as basis for building out working CCM xCP app.

Another thing that bugs me is the UI design doc.  There are actually real screenshots for the CCM xCelerator.  This means someone actually had to create the forms and configure TaskSpace application.  Why was the forms and taskspace app not include as part of the xCelerator?  If EMC is concerned about supporting “un-tested” xCelerator, let the community support it.  I would rather have something unsupported and try to trouble shoot bugs than having to create something from scratch.  Unfortunately, this is what I will have to do.  The idea of CCM looks promising, but the delivery of working CCM app is going to take some time and effort.

BTW – the other two “xcelerators” (TaskSpace Advanced Search and Custom Activity Templates) are not apps as well.  They are new “components” that can be included in xcp.  I think these components are great addition to xcp “toolbox” of building apps quickly and with minimal customization.  This reminds of the Component Exchange (http://developer.emc.com/developer/componentexchange.htm)  that Documentum Developer’s community used to host back in the day.  Personally, I would call these components something other than xCelerators and leave the moniker to be used for full-blown apps.

Also, I have seen multiple posts from non-EMC folks who want to contribute their xCelerators to the site.  What ever happen with this?  Is this an issue with EMC not wanting to “promoting” contributions from non-EMC employees or have these users withdrawn their offer to contribute?  I would love to know the criteria that EMC has in order to post an individual’s xCelerator to the site.

I feel that all of the pieces are there and there is interest from the developers community, the question is whether EMC can effectively encourage and promote the development of xCelerators by the community.