SharePoint / Documentum Integration

SharePoint and Documentum offer distinctly different approaches to managing content, but there are actually many areas of overlapping functionality. Each method has its place and application, its pros and cons.

So, when should you use SharePoint, and when should you use Documentum?

A SharePoint solution applies when your scenario looks like this:

• Back-office and desktop environments are focused around  Microsoft (SQL, Server 2003/2008, Office 2003/2007, BizTalk),
• File sizes are typically less than 25MB,
• Environments are hosted via an Application Service Provider,
• Internet access is critical and you have an enterprise search portal,
• Departmental collaboration is important, and

• ERP or CRM systems in the environment support, and leverage SharePoint web parts-based integration.

A Documentum solution applies when your scenario looks like this:

• Workflows are initiated with high-volume scanning and indexing (like Captiva),
• Complex workflow and integration requirements exist,
• There is a need for complex document lifecycles in a regulated environment (e.g., you generate quarterly reports, SEC documentation, etc.), and
• Formal record-management policies are needed. 

The key is that each platform is useful for different scenarios-when planning the content management solution for your enterprise, consider your needs.

What happens when you need both? That's where integration happens.

Depending on requirements, an integration between SharePoint and Documentum can be relatively simple, or extremely complicated. Crown Partners has implemented both using various approaches and deployments.

For scenarios where the key requirement is to be able to make Documentum content available for read-only consumption within a SharePoint environment, Crown's SPIN component can be used to easily push content to SharePoint.  SPIN leverages EMC Documentum's Site Caching Services (SCS) in conjunction with a special wrapper component created by Crown Partners to enable users to publish content to SharePoint.

SPIN was developed using MS .NET and can be used to publish content to either existing SharePoint libraries or to libraries created on the fly. Content metadata and security settings are applied as part of the publishing process using standard SharePoint Object Model constructs, with the end result being that content in SharePoint appears to the user as standard SharePoint objects.

SPIN Publishing processes are configured using Documentum Administrator. When a publishing operation occurs, SPIN uses SCS to transfer all content files and associated metadata (using an XML data file) that meets the specified publishing criteria to the publishing target using the HTTP/HTTPS protocol. The publishing target is (typically) a web server instance associated with a SharePoint installation. Because XML files are used to transfer metadata and configuration information to the publishing target, it is not necessary to install/maintain a database in the publishing environment.

Once content and meta data has been transferred, a post-sync script is executed that parses the transferred data and associated parameter file(s) (files that contain pointers to metadata files and the locations of content files) and then places content and sets associated metadata within the SharePoint library structure.

During publishing SPIN will (depending on configuration) automatically create new SharePoint content types for all configured Documentum object types, creating any appropriate SharePoint site columns to store configured metadata.  When content within Documentum is deleted, the next time the publishing process executes the document in SharePoint is automatically removed, unless the document is referenced in other SharePoint locations in which case the document is simply flagged for removal. When content (or metadata) is updated in Documentum, these updates are pushed to SharePoint the next time the publishing process runs.

SPIN also supports multi-threading of the publishing operation, thereby providing extensive control over the publishing process, allowing SPSite and SPWeb open operations to be executed only once per SharePoint site collection and/or web site. 

Therefore, it is important that the user has permissions both to the destination site collection as an owner, as well as to be able to read the Farm Configuration database. In other words, this user should be treated just like an application pool service account.

Crown Partners has been fortunate to be involved in many kinds of SharePoint/Documentum integrations. If the out-of-the-box SharePoint integration doesn't fit the bill, ask us about devising a custom integration from spec based on your enterprise's requirements.

Learn more here, or contact us at info@crownpartners.com.

Questions or comments? info@crownpartners.com

Crown Recycle Bin

Still the Best for Restoring Deleted Objects in Documentum.

Crown Recycle Bin is the best tool on the market for restoring accidentally deleted folders, sub-folders, emails with attachments, complete with metadata and date tags. And now, Crown Recycle Bin is the only object restoration tool you'll find on the market. 

We've Said it Before, But it's Worth Repeating...

No IT involvement. No hassles. No headaches. No Learning Curve. Recycle Bin is easy to install, configure and deploy.

"Can I recover an email deleted 8 months ago with its original time stamp?"

Yes. Three months, nine months - you define the timeframe that's right for your enterprise. Documents are recoverable with all the metadata intact in minutes, not hours or days. All without involving your IT division. (In fact, if you've used Microsoft's Recycle Bin, you know just how easy Crown Recycle Bin is to use.) 

Recycle Bin at a Glance:

• DFE accredited
• No IT involvement
• No hassles
• No headaches
• No Learning Curve
• Tested and Trusted by thousands of users

Why Customers Love It

• Documents recoverable by end-users or administrators. You decide.
• Works with Documentum D6 and previous Documentum versions.
• Supports retention policy services.
• Eliminates the need to look in tape backups.

Questions or comments? info@crownpartners.com

Personalize Web Visitor Experiences with Xena

Your website is your company's most powerful marketing tool. In today's e-commerce driven world, it's crucial not only to attract and engage website visitors, but also to get them to come back. In spite of its importance, it's not enough to simply provide the correct information quickly and easily.  Today's web users are savvy and expect a flexible, intuitive, personal experience when visiting your site.

Unfortunately, web content is frequently company-centric and generic, with a search engine that's equally lackluster.  In fact, the only thing worse than not having a search engine is providing a search engine that doesn't deliver.

The Solution? Xena

Crown Partners offers Xena, a personalization and full-text search framework that delivers what it promises. It's simple, flexible, scalable, robust, and affordable. And best of all, Xena was created specifically for the dynamic websites you're building in Documentum Web Publisher.

Why It Works
Based on the trusted open-source software Apache Lucene used in 70% of the world's websites, Xena uses dynamic data (like registration form info, shopping cart purchases, and keyword searches), to personalize web pages for each visitor.

You'll realize other benefits by switching to Xena, too. In most cases Xena can replace the expensive, overly complex portal solutions you have now to reduce licensing costs, hardware resources, maintenance effort, and solution time to market.

Give Visitors What They Crave
Make the most of every click on your website with a cost-effective solution that delivers personalized display for every website visitor. And reap the benefits of powerful, customized search capabilities so visitors find what they really want without wading through content that's not important to them.

Questions or comments? info@crownpartners.com

Velocity to Results: Solving Your Business Problems Faster, Better, Cheaper

Written By Richard Hearn, CEO & Managing Director, Crown Partners

Maximizing your technology investments is crucial to your bottom line. Whether you're weighing your software and hardware options or are focused on how to best implement them in your IT environment, you need to know that you're making the most strategic, cost-effective decisions for your company. And to be sure, this cost-effectiveness extends far beyond looking at the purchase price of IT solutions. Rather, it also lives in how effectively you implement and leverage your new technology so that you can get the best return on your IT investment. That is, how much more efficiently you can drive your business processes as a result of these new solutions, how much more productive your teams can be, how much better you can serve your customers, and so on. You also want the fastest time to value possible, enabled by speedy implementations and appropriate training for both IT and end-user personnel.

When companies lack the resources or skill sets needed, they elicit the help of IT consulting agencies to advise them or assist them in the best way to use IT to meet their business objectives-which always includes reducing expenses and increasing profitability. But here's the dilemma for more and more companies these days with locked or diminishing IT budgets: They're trying to cut costs and so turn to IT consulting companies to help them run more efficient corporate machines. But are they spending excessive amounts of money on consulting services and custom products in an effort to eventually streamline operations, to the point that they're greatly diminishing the ROI on their total investment to get these solutions up and running, use them, and maintain them?

The Cost of Custom Consulting: A Bunch

The truth is, the consulting business is typically about trying to bill for as many consultants per hour as possible, and for as many functions as possible. And how can they justify this? They're developing a "custom solution" expressly for you, convincing you that it's the only way to truly get your business needs met. Even if they can ultimately get you where you want to be with your new technology investments, what will it cost to get you there? And even more important, what are they leaving you with as far as tools and knowledge and a maintenance strategy?

Custom solutions are fine and even necessary in some circumstances. But sometimes, these "custom" solutions are so customized that companies not only pay dearly for the product-they take 6 to 12 months or more to implement, are extremely complex to debug, and are even tougher to maintain. Worse yet, if they're integrated on top of an existing platform-such as a content management, records management, imaging, or analytics system-and that platform is upgraded to the its new release, your custom solution will need to adapt to the upgraded platform. How will you get there? Your one-off custom solution may stand alone where integrating with future upgrades of surrounding systems is concerned. It may work great today, but its future is a complete unknown.

Another mistake companies make in turning to IT consulting firms is looking for a solution to a current business problem without looking for a way to make that solution repeatable in the future. Take for example a company that solicits the expertise of an IT consulting company to help them migrate massive amounts of data from one repository to the next. Today, many companies are faced with migrating EMC Documentum eRoom documents and data to EMC CenterStage repositories. Some of these companies are hiring consulting teams to migrate all of their content to the new EMC platform. And the next time they need to migrate content to a new EMC system? They hire a consulting firm to perform another custom migration, which is often unnecessary.

Clearly, custom consulting is big business with big bucks in it for the consulting firms. But what if IT consulting instead had your back? What if IT consulting founded its practices on the best way to empower your organization to need them for as little time as possible today, and for little or no time down the line?

We're Not Like the Rest

Well, here's where Crown Partners is distinctly different than other professional services firms out there. We do have your back, and we're not in it to make the greatest profit possible from our engagement with you. Instead, we're here to help you run your business more efficiently and more profitably. Here's the Crown difference in a nutshell and what it offers you:

• Crown's "software first" approach to enterprise solutions - Our years of industry experience and ongoing research tells us that regardless of how customized a solution might be, 80 percent of the solution is standard to countless other companies in the same boat. To put it a different way, others in that same industry or facing similar business challenges, such as web content management or loan origination processing have 80 percent of the same problems and only 20 percent of problems unique to them.
• Our relentless automation of repeatable tasks - Crown automates those capabilities that address the standard 80 percent of the business challenges, in the form of Crown software products and utilities, as well as frameworks. This saves companies huge amounts of money, and significantly increases their return on those already pared-down investments. We turn $500,000 migration projects into $50,000 migration projects, and leave you with the tools and know-how to do future migration projects yourself. We can save companies from implementing a $4 million loan origination system by instead implementing a $400,000 loan origination system, and in six months instead of three years.
• The best practices we pass along to you - Our long history of implementations on platforms like EMC Documentum, Oracle Hyperion, and Microsoft SharePoint allows us to roll our practical knowledge and best practices directly into our solutions. In this way, you don't just purchase our expertise during a consulting project; you get to reuse our proven best practices through our robust software solutions, along with our guidance on how to implement them or through our implementation and upgrade services. We also develop our solutions parallel to the platforms they integrate with, so that when upgrades are made to EMC CenterStage, our products will continue to seamlessly integrate with your EMC platform.
• Our depth of industry expertise - We launched in 2001 and have remained successful since. But even more, we've earned the reputation for being one of the world's leading software and professional services firms-exclusively focused on enterprise information management. We're a Certified Advantage Partner with Oracle. We've been accredited as "Designed for EMC" since 2004. Our innovative Crown Buldoser product was selected by EMC as the Designed for EMC "2008 Offering of the Year." When you hire Crown, you hire the collective experience of our talented, intensely knowledgeable team. And when you purchase our products, you get that knowledge plus intelligent automation packaged into the Crown solution.

Cruising at the Speed of Crown

So what does all of this mean to you? It's proof that you don't have to buy into the inefficiencies and exorbitant costs of custom consulting. Instead, you can allow Crown Partners to help you automate your business processes and operate more intelligently-whether we're providing our management consulting, technology expertise, turnkey IT solutions, or application hosting. And whatever we're providing, you'll see better outcomes dramatically faster than you'll see from the typical IT consulting firm. It's the Crown difference: delivering "velocity to results," that produces a tangible result that you can achieve affordably.

Questions or comments? info@crownpartners.com

Enterprise Content Management Customers Speak Out

Summary from Crown Customer Forum: May 2009

Companies today-regardless of the size or industry-face complex, and typically costly content management challenges. From content availability to version control to archiving, content management touches every corner of the organization. Yet simply managing content isn't enough. Companies must look to innovative enterprise content management (ECM) strategies and solutions to streamline processes around managing content and more importantly, to infuse the greatest business value into how they use their enterprise-wide content.

To keep pace with the ongoing and evolving strategies within companies to leverage their content for maximum advantage, ECM tools and technologies must also continue to evolve-and in direct relation to customer needs. So Crown Partners set out to understand more about the content management needs, experiences, and direction of customers. Since founding in 2001, Crown Partners has been serving as a trusted source of services and technology for content-related migrations and upgrades. And Crown's leadership role and ECM solution vision hinges on continued awareness of the changing business needs of our customers. To that end, Crown Partners sponsors a continuing series of  qualitative market research events, called Crown Forums.  Most recently, Crown Partners sponsored the  Crown Customer Forum (Forum) held in May 2009 in conjunction with the EMC World Conference in Orlando, Florida.

The provocative format of the Forum involved seven facilitated, persona-oriented conversations running concurrently, which customers engaged in freely. Conversations veered away from ECM product feature discussions and instead focused on the deeper ECM problems and solutions in important areas including:

• The role of ECM in compliance
• Delivering ECM via a shared services model
• Approaches to ECM solution development
• ECM infrastructure
• Web content management
• Managing email
• ECM system administration

These focused discussions offer rich insight into common ECM problems and business challenges, experiences with available products and technology, and anticipated trends. Thanks to the participation of these valued partners within the Crown community, Crown can better define its vision for the software and professional services that help companies optimize performance of the EMC Documentum, Oracle Hyperion, and Microsoft SharePoint platforms. This article presents key findings from the Forum related to leveraging existing assets, using shared services models, maturing the ECM infrastructure, and more. However, you can download Crown's free Enterprise Content Management Customer Forum Summary Report in its entirety at crownpartners.com.

Leveraging Existing Assets

Where content is concerned, companies are yearning for higher productivity and greater quality. They especially want to improve their marketing content and email management, along with their records management and eDiscovery capabilities. For these and other reasons, the demand for deploying content management solutions is growing. And with strapped budgets and limited resources, organizations are delivering their ECM solutions by leveraging existing software and infrastructure investments, plus improving content-related business processes and workflow and establishing sensible, enforceable policies.

Compliance is an important area where companies see opportunities to both maximize their technology investments while turning to new tools for assistance. Audit and litigation risks continue to rise, and corporate and legal standards are also intensifying. Yet companies are challenged to find a cost-effective approach to litigation and compliance activities around records management and eDiscovery. Nonetheless, the advantages of electronic records management over paper are obvious to companies. "The investment is a small pain now, but once it reaches a critical mass, the company will see the value," says one participant. Participants also agree that records management and audit processes are most effective when addressed via a single repository, even with scale, performance, operational, and other considerations.

Many companies are lacking the intelligent policies needed to support their existing technologies and processes. For example, companies report not having clear policies that identify the content system of record for all content. They say it's also sometimes unclear which system to go to for the most precise and up-to-date content. Even the most sophisticated ECM technology won't get the expected ROI and can even be a litigation liability if it lacks the intelligent policy to drive it. Looking ahead, it appears that businesses will commit funding for policy development, since the technology can only support an organization's commitment to compliance.

For some businesses, EMC workflow is surprisingly difficult and complex. They look forward to product enhancements that will make the solutions easier to deploy and the content easier to manage. This is especially true since companies see workflow and business process management as playing key enabling roles for records management and compliance moving forward.

Companies see their websites as fulfilling a range of purposes, especially sales, building loyalty, and supporting their business communities. They measure the effectiveness of their websites in meeting these and other needs using a range of metrics and analytics as feedback. And to be sure, companies depend on a continuous stream of dynamic web content, establishing a growing need for ECM. According to one Forum participant, "Our CFO has been inundated with requests for web content management solutions." For some, growth is proving painful, however. Some participants report that new versions of websites and new website features are outstripping the capabilities of the infrastructure.

Yet participants also report making efforts to improve what they have, basically employing the "doing more with less" strategy. Some are working to coordinate-and therefore optimize-their web and print marketing investments, such as brochures and newsletters. In some cases they reuse HTML content in print materials, while print content is reused on the website. Some companies are seeing the benefits of standardizing their approaches to component building and prototyping. Others are enhancing their processes around content ownership to avoid costly mistakes, such as inadvertently using restricted images in published materials.

Overall, though, companies report that their current investment in records management, compliance, and web content management is inadequate for today's standards and varying business requirements. These and other areas of content management are calling for technology improvements to ensure smooth daily business operations and ongoing compliance.

Using Shared Services Models

Organizations continue to identify ways to improve their solution-deployment abilities and reduce related costs. Some participants report accomplishing both through shared services models focused on common applications they can use repeatedly across the enterprise. Shared services organizations often support centralized and standards-based information technology strategies. Though companies differ in their direction toward centralization or decentralization, the current trend toward centralization favors and encourages businesses to use the shared services model.

Shared services offerings include a range of services and solutions, such as regulated systems delivery and operation, general content management solutions, document management hosting services, and a departmental filing cabinet with a configurable EMC Documentum Webtop interface and Documentum TaskSpace interface. These and other shared services solutions make it easier for businesses to improve their ability to respond to litigation holds.

Participants note lacking a mandate to use the shared services offerings. Instead, internal customers have the option of using these shared offerings. For organizations convinced of the value of the shared services model, some apply internal cross charges to shared services to encourage the use of the common applications and discourage one-off customization solutions. Yet tight budgets, inherent limitations, and business concerns around the shared services model can result in less than optimal results or even inhibit companies from taking the shared services plunge. Shared services models sometimes fail due to inability to scale and inability to integrate. Some businesses report concerns about loss of control when they rely upon shared services-including loss of control on service levels, exposure to cost, and licenses. And shared services organizations sometimes lack financial resources in comparison to other organizations.

Still, more and more companies are expected to adopt the shared services model as an important practice. Those already consolidating applications into a service-oriented organizational unit will continue to seek ways to serve more internal customers economically. Importantly, shared services organizations will enable and accelerate the implementation of records management across the enterprise. According to one proponent of shared services, "There is no other strong records management offering in the enterprise and internal customers are coming to us for the records management capabilities we offer. We had not anticipated the importance of records management, but it is turning out to be an advantage for us versus our internal competitors."

Layering Architectures and Organizations

Some participants note a conflict between needing tailored business solutions on the one hand and respecting IT standards on the other. Organizations are learning they can accomplish both through an approach that defines responsibility and allows varying degrees of flexibility at each of several layers in a solution. For existing applications, companies are looking to improve productivity for a better return on those investments. New solutions in particular demand are in the areas of longer-term email storage; business process management; CAD drawings management; contract management; facilities documents management; document scanning; and point solutions for R&D, regulatory submissions, and regulatory affairs.

Organizations will increasingly manage layers of the infrastructure-including servers, storage, and other back-end components-independently. Yet integrating applications is proving to be an important initiative. Based on participant feedback, integration is the most common solution project, especially integration between different content management technologies. In particular, companies are investing in strategies for integrating Documentum and IBM Lotus Notes, Documentum and Microsoft SharePoint, and Documentum and IXOS.

However, companies report experiencing challenges with integration projects. According to one Forum participant, "We are developing a custom integration on our own between different content repositories. The challenges are great and the effort is not living up to expectations." Another reports, "We have a very mature document management environment, but we're not really sure how to put together a strategy to consolidate our systems."

Regardless, integration efforts will continue to expand. Companies are especially focused on integration across a variety of content management technologies. In the next two to three years, organizations will address integration with ERP applications as a strategic initiative. Participants report a need for collaboration solutions for project management, product design, sales account management, and electronic workflow. In addition, collaboration will become increasingly important as businesses adopt social networking software as a part of the business infrastructure.

Maturing the ECM Infrastructure

As companies continue to support the established ECM infrastructure, efforts to "mature" the content management infrastructure are increasing. Participants stress the importance of a content management infrastructure that's standards-based, reliable, and uniform. With an effective, efficient ECM infrastructure in place, participants say that businesses and shared services organizations have compelling budgetary and strategic incentives to leverage the infrastructure.

Planning and operating the ECM infrastructure demands many complex technical, business, and organizational considerations for companies. Managing the ECM infrastructure is particularly difficult when some ECM products aren't always friendly, out-of-the-box solutions, as reported by several participants. Customers note significant risks in managing the infrastructure, including unknown behaviors in the elements of the infrastructure, the interaction among different elements, and not understanding the environment in general. Some companies face additional complexities due to a wide range of hardware configurations across locations and geographies. One participant reports, "Trying to keep all of the moving parts in lockstep is a nightmare." Also, integration of multiple content management technologies, such as Lotus Notes, Documentum, and SharePoint increases the complexity of the infrastructure.

Overall, organizations report compelling reasons to continue developing the ECM infrastructure. For instance, some companies are strengthening their commitment to Documentum as a single standard for trusted content. Others report having EMC Documentum Records Manager and EMC Documentum Retention Policy Services for email on their purchasing list. Participants note that users want to put content into Documentum, not just save it locally. They note that Documentum is a safe place to save email, since it eliminates automatic deletion resulting from compliance with mailbox size restrictions.

However, participants report a clear need to make it easier for users to export email to Documentum. Efficiency is critical to user adoption, according to participants. Companies contend with a large volume of email content, and email management has special requirements relating to response time and throughput. Increasing volume of images will greatly drive up storage requirements as well. On the whole, companies will need to accommodate larger volumes of most types of content through continued enhancements to ECM throughput and performance.

Customer Needs, Crown Requirements

Knowing our customers and their particular business needs is crucial to Crown's continued ability to deliver the solutions, services, and training our customers demand for business agility. Thus, the Crown Customer Forum proved an invaluable tool for understanding more about the greatest ECM challenges our customers are experiencing, what is needed to help solve them, and how they hope to leverage ECM in their organizations in the near and distant future. Crown Partners will continue to engage with our customers for important input, so that the direction of our solution vision remains in step with their vision for success.

Download the Forum Report

• Enterprise Content Management Customer Forum Summary Report

Questions or comments? info@crownpartners.com

Need a Prescription for Better Performance? A System HealthCheck Might be the Cure.

Written By: Lynn Fraas, Vice President Practice Operations

System slowdowns cause large-scale pain and suffering for everyone. Do you know how to improve response time, make end-users happier, and improve overall system performance? A Crown Partners' System HealthCheck is designed to identify obstacles to optimal performance not only uncovers obstacles that are causing problems, but also and identifies appropriate fixes designed to eliminate the obstacles. HealthCheck is a way to find out why your system does not perform at optimal speed, and what you can do to improve your overall system performance.

"There's no silver bullet for a slow system," says Crown's Lynn Fraas, Vice President, Practice Operations. It's a process like diagnosing a disorder. At Crown, we use special tools and techniques that allow us to quickly and systematically identify factors that affect performance. Yet, there are times when we may identify where the problem is not, then proceed to narrow the focus to find out where the true problem lies."

How does it work?

First we identify your organization's performance expectations, and gain a thorough understanding of the system architecture and all components, followed by a review of your organization's perceived performance issues. We interview key personnel, perform in-depth analysis on the entire system, look at end-users' experiences, and run a series of diagnostic tests tailored specifically for your system. Armed with the results we present you with a detailed report.

What will you learn?

"Crown's consultants assess the overall health of your Documentum environment," says Fraas, "We identify critical factors that are causing the most pain, make recommendations for appropriate fixes that could reduce, or in some cases eliminate, that pain, and prioritize the recommended fixes as immediate, near-term, or long-term, so customers know where to begin." The report can be used to develop a roadmap for your organization to use to improve and enhance your ECM infrastructure.

Why Crown?

Sure, your team can make the improvements and fixes in-house, but it's not easy to pinpoint the multiple sources of system-wide sludge. And sometimes trying to identify the source of the slowdown can become, well, tricky, politically speaking. Crown Partners is an independent, objective third-party with years of experience and extensive expertise on multiple platforms and multiple configurations. The System HealthCheck is the perfect way to return your Documentum system performance to optimal levels. Email us or call today to schedule the System HealthCheck or learn more.  

Questions or comments? info@crownpartners.com

Documentum and SharePoint Integration (SPIN)

Written by: Barry Besecker, Vice President Web & Marketing Practice

To say you rely heavily on your EMC Documentum and Microsoft SharePoint platforms is probably an understatement. After all, they were big investments that paid off. Each platform has its strengths. And your content authors are accustomed to using the pair for content editing and publishing. Recreating all those web sites and migrating all that content to SharePoint seems a bit nightmarish. What if you could leave your content and web pages where they are, and publish content from Documentum to SharePoint as if it had been on SharePoint all along?

That's the idea behind Crown Documentum SharePoint Integration-SPIN, for short. SPIN simplifies the editing environment for your authors. It uses Crown Web Composer to marry content editing on Documentum with content publishing on SharePoint. 

Here's what the process looks like for users: 

1. An author locates the content to edit through the SharePoint portal.
2. The author clicks on the Crown Web Composer editor. Web Composer pulls and loads the content from Documentum.
3. The author edits the content, and saves it. It is versioned in Documentum, transformed, and automatically published by Documentum's Site Caching Services (CCS) to a temporary file store.

In temporary storage, a post-publishing function loads the content, and all its metadata, into SharePoint and it is available for consumption through your SharePoint portals.

SPIN provides you with the best features of Documentum and SharePoint. It eliminates the complexity and cost of a tight integration. Authors can edit Documentum content directly from SharePoint because SPIN synchronizes the data and security between the two platforms. Because SPIN uses Crown Web Composer, you can continue to use your Documentum platform as you have in the past. You're simply publishing rendered Documentum content to SharePoint. Documentum is the contribution side of the equation; SharePoint is the consumption side.

Take the next step! Contact us about integrating your SharePoint and Documentum data. Visit us at http://www.crownpartners.com/ or email info@crownpartners.com

Questions or comments? info@crownpartners.com

Ending the Tyranny of False Network Connectivity Assumptions

You can't always connect to a network. Some have done better with that reality than others.

Microsoft desktop software assumes the user is connected to the network. I've been on a 100% travel schedule for years at a time, so the assumption of full-time network connection seems outlandishly wishful. I've found Outlook particularly offensive in this regard. After years of trying to get used to it, I still want to return to Lotus Notes Mail, which was designed with a traveler like me in mind.

Verizon's VZAccess Manager and AT&T's Communication Manager have provided good data network connections for the significant amounts of time between hotel rooms and offices. Airlines such as AirTran now offer connections while in flight. The only problem is that the assumptions about connectivity require more bandwidth than these services generally deliver.

I don't hold it against developers who build assumptions into their software based on a future expectation of infrastructure. I understand that as much as I do travel, many others do most of their work from an office with a lot of reliable bandwidth. At the same time, there is a large and growing community of mobile people like me who have been forced to improvise and scramble to use software designed with us as an afterthought.

There is new hope that the tyranny of false network connectivity assumptions may come to an end. It comes from "desktop" and social networking applications accessed via mobile devices such as Blackberry and iPhone.

I wanted to see Matt Coblentz's presentation of CenterStage Mobile Client at EMC World last week, but schedule conflicts prevented it. I saw Matt in the corridor later and he showed me something more convincing. He demonstrated on the spot that he is already using CenterStage Mobile Client with his Blackberry Bold. I am not a bleeding edge technology adapter. Relative to others in the industry, I am a laggard, but not this time. I've seen CenterStage Mobile Client in action. It's a real productivity enhancer. It will work with my existing Blackberry, and I want it.

That answers one of the questions posed in last week's post, and here are the others:

Q: Does CenterStage provide the end user functionality that users and businesses will readily adopt?
A: This is highly addictive functionality. Once users get their hands on it, they won't want to let it go.

Q: Does CenterStage fully deliver the back end capabilities of Documentum Content Server?
A: In theory yes, CenterStage delivers the backend functionality. It's a good bet that this theory will be proven in fact, because all CenterStage content is being stored in CenterStage.

Q: Does CenterStage have the flexibility to allow enterprises to centralize or decentralize administrative responsibilities? To the extent administrative responsibilities are decentralized, does CenterStage allow safeguards to keep departmental administrators within bounds of enterprise policies?
A: CenterStage is looking good in this regard. Initial deployments will prove it out, but this seems like another low risk bet.

Q: Does CenterStage have an advantage in accelerating mobile computing applications?
A: This is the real surprise behind CenterStage. I didn't think this question was going to have the most exciting answer, but it does. If you're a mobile professional you can see an end to the tyranny of false assumptions about connectivity.

Questions or comments? info@crownpartners.com

The Dawn of New Age of Collaboration?

Ever since there have been departmental systems, Collaboration has been departmentally focused.  eRoom, Lotus Notes, and SharePoint owe their success to end user functionality on the one hand, but also to departmental deployment and control models that support viral adoption across the enterprise on the other hand.  Given the trends of enterprise consolidation and cloud computing, the time may have come for the pendulum to swing back to a centralized model for collaboration software.  (Remember collaboration before Lotus Notes?)

The pendulum should not swing to complete centralization of responsibility and costs.  Rather there should be a shift that lets responsibility and cost lie where it is most effective.  In such a shift, enterprise policies would be controlled centrally.  Work structures would be defined and implemented in decentralized fashion, for greatest responsiveness to the demands of work on the front lines.  Each business would fine tune the balance of what is  centralized and what is decentralized according to its own needs.

Consolidation within enterprises and cloud computing are driving the infrastructure for centralized computing, but what about application software for centrally deployed collaboration?  EMC Documentum CenterStage targets this space.  More will be revealed about CenterStage this week at EMC World 2009 and we'll all be better able to gauge the alignment of the trends toward centralized infrastructure with the centralized control model of CenterStage.

Here are a few things to look for:

• Does CenterStage provide the end user functionality that users and businesses will readily adopt?
  
• Does CenterStage fully deliver the back end capabilities of Documentum Content Server?
  
• Does CenterStage have the flexibility to allow enterprises to centralize or decentralize administrative responsibilities?
  
• To the extent administrative responsibilities are decentralized, does CenterStage allow safeguards to keep departmental administrators within bounds of enterprise policies?
  
• Does CenterStage have an advantage in accelerating mobile computing applications?

 

A good portion of the 2009 EMC World content management agenda is allocated to CenterStage.  The next few days will shed some light on whether CenterStage is a sign of the dawn of a new age of collaboration.  

Questions or comments? info@crownpartners.com

Web 2.0: Hot or Hype?

"Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform", says Tim O'Reilly. "I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means.", says Tim Berners-Lee, "It's dookie." They are both right, but it doesn't matter.

Whether you agree with O'Reilly or Berners-Lee, information technology organizations must deal with the adoption of social-networking, video-sharing, wikis, blogs, and user tagging. Because people use them and businesses demand them, the infrastructure has to control and support Web 2.0 applications.

Public Web 2.0 facilities can achieve inter-company benefits, but those public facilities don't meet the large organization's need for control or support in the areas of retention, access, security, availability, and cost. In those large organizations, rogue Web 2.0 islands have likely sprung up internally and increasing adoption has caused unplanned cost and risk. Public facilities and rogue islands were fine when Web 2.0 applications were an experiment, but for many companies, enterprise-caliber infrastructure is now required.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technology is a promising backbone for Web 2.0 applications. The appeal of ECM is first in the fit and maturity of the technology. ECM is designed to manage unstructured information such as addressed by Web 2.0 applications and has been proven at enterprise scale for over a decade. The appeal of ECM is also in the potential to leverage existing investments. Most large companies have existing ECM platform investments that can provide needed support and control to Web 2.0 applications.

EMC Documentum Content Server (Documentum) is playing the role of backbone for Web 2.0 applications via two different approaches. First, Documentum has traditionally played a repository role for custom-built or niche front-end applications. Documentum plays a similar back end role when used in conjunction with Web 2.0 solutions built using Crown SiteBuilder and Crown Web Gear products. In the second approach, EMC has built on it's eRoom heritage of providing application front-ends, and EMC is now extending eRoom solidly into the Web 2.0 era with its CenterStage product.

If you have enterprise-scale Web 2.0 needs, Crown can help you evaluate your options and put the appropriate infrastructure in place. Ask us about our SiteBuilder and Web Gear products and about our experience with EMC CenterStage.

Questions or comments? info@crownpartners.com