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.

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!

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.

After reading both BMOC and Pie’s postings about how they got started in Documentum, I felt inspired to reflect on the origins of Documentum Guru.

It was the summer of 1996. I just graduated from Georgia Tech and started my first job out of college as a systems analyst for a government contractor. I was supposed to be working on some modeling and simulation project, but due to the time it took to relocate back to DC, that slot was given to someone else. I ended working on some internal IT project using Visual Basic. Visual Basic 4.0 was a big change from the FORTRAN I learned in undergrad and grad school. Within a couple months, I was finally comfortable enough with language that I created a VB/ASP program called InfoClip, which allowed users to manage PPT slides as if they were posted on a wall. I guess this was the start of my “content management” career. I learned the complexities of versioning, security, and lifecycle from this project.

Fast forward to fall of ‘96. We showcased this application to one of our government clients. The client was intrigued by the visualization concept and wanted to know if we could integrate it with an existing document management system called Documentum. Document-um what.

I was sent to Chicago (my first visit to the windy city) to get trained on WorkSpace 3.2. This was prior to EDMS98 and the architecture was still client-server based. The customization language was Docbasic along with the Documentum APIs, which by the way are still used. If you wanted to create custom UIs, you had to use an application called Quickbuilder, which is similar to Forms Builder in a lot of ways. Interesting how technologies go in and out of style like clothing.

Anyways, I picked up the “fundamentals” and was ready to start integrating InfoClip with Documentum. Unfortunately, the client re-prioritized this need and my training was not needed any more. I stayed with that company for a couple more years at which point I decided to look for a real IT consulting job. I ended up going to a local consulting company called Infodata. They saw that I had Documentum training and had previous experience with government. Fast forward to today and I am still working with Documentum thirteen years later. I tell a lot of people that I was lucky to “fall into” a technology that has lasted this long. Many of my friends worked with software vendors that are no longer around or have been gobbled up by bigger companies.

I later found out that Infodata was the company that proposed and installed Documentum at the government client that wanted me to get trained on Documentum. Is this fate or just dumb luck?

Alfresco 3 Enterprise Content Management Implementation by Munwar Shariff, Vinita Choudhary, Amita Bhandari, and Pallika Majumdar

After reviewing the first version of this book, Alfresco Enterprise Content Management Implementation, a few months ago, the writer/publisher provided me a free copy of the book and wanted me to review the updated version.

My first impression of the book was that it was much larger than the first book, about 40% more pages. This makes sense, since Alfresco 3 has a lot more features than Alfresco 1.4, which the first book was based off of. Here is my synopsis of the various chapters:

Chapter 1-8 reviews basic features in Alfresco 3. There is new info on dynamic model and how it supports multi-tenancy, which is also a new feature in Alfresco Enterprise. The advanced workflow chapter has been updated and flows better than as described in the first book. This was my only “complaint” in the first book. I was delighted to see that this was addressed in the current version.

Chapter 9 discusses various methods to integrate with other applications. This chapter reads like a cookbook, but this is probably due to the various enhancements to Alfresco 3 that were created to support CMIS, REST, and other apps like Liferay, Dupal, Joomla, iPhone, iGoogle, and Facebook. The core of many of these enhancements is the use of web scripts. For those of you not familiar with web scripts, the authors did a good job describing the technology and providing examples of how to integrate Alfresco with these other apps.

Chapter 10 covers Alfresco Share, which is the collaborative UI built as alternative to SharePoint. Unlike the rest of the book, this chapter was written like a user guide to my dismay. It went into great detail of how to perform various actions in the Share. This information is already available as part of the product help. A high-level overview of all the various features would have been sufficient.

Chapter 11 & 12 talks about how to customize Alfresco Explorer & Share and how Search works. With Alfresco 3, search now includes Open Search, which supports federated search across multiple Alfresco repositories as well as other data sources (eg Yahoo, Google, etc).

Chapter 13 provides an updated example of how to implement a imaging and forms processing solution using Alfresco.

Chapter 14 (the final chapter) provides updated information on the administration of Alfresco. This includes descriptions of how Alfresco can be clustered (multi-server/single repository) and how to set up a Alfresco in a fail-over mode (hot backup). There is also a section describing user quota feature that is part of the multi-tenancy support. I found this chapter very insightful and most useful from an application architect perspective.

Overall, this book is a excellent primer if you are learning about Alfresco for the first time. If you already know the basics about Alfresco or if you already have the original book, about half the book is similar to the original. The other half covers new features in Alfresco 3.

On a side note, even though Alfresco as a technology is cool, Alfresco as an organization is not as impressive. I have reached out to three different people at Alfresco requesting information and have not received any replies. You have to wonder how many people actually are working behind the scenes.