Day: November 7, 2012

EMC Momentum Vienna 2012: Documentum D2 and Mobile Roadmap

Posted on by alexandra
David Le Strat answering questions during Q&A

They started by defining what the New User really means:

“Clean, modern UI, access to info everywhere, on any devices, and wirh diversity of content types”

The move to D2 was because a realization of a more agile process away from traditional coding practices and towards easy instant configuration. As in Vegas people pointed out that it is not just about configuring the user experience but also a rules engine for content. One reason EMC acquired D2 was a realization that customers didn’t fit in the previous product boxes like knowledge worker, rich media, process etc. David also introduced an explanation  of the difference between D2 and xCP which I think is the best yet:

xCP is configuration for “design-time” while D2 is config for “run-time”

The message was also that the usability that we all strive for comes when the UI is easy to use but also very easy to configure to different user’s needs. Today version 3.1 of D2 is consider the Power User tool but the plan is to move all these features gradually to 4.x releases of D2.

Future

Rich Media viewer aligned with xCP is planned (showed video preview with collection objects in a lower bar) as well as some Centerstage features.

Ver 4.1 is planned for Q2 2013 and include the following features:

  • Advanced search with facets
  • Virtual document editing
  • Native annotation (just basic – still a place for 3rd party tools)
  • Syncplicty and mobile integration
  • Extended widget integration
  • Rich text comments
  • Advanced property inheritance
  • IRM integration
  • Custom menus
  • Administration widget
  • Public API for integration into external zoos
  • Distributed administration

When it comes to partner integrations things like the Brava viewer is supported in 4.1 and I think both an Active-X and HTML version of it.

Integration of the Euroscript reporting tool was also highlighted which of course make one wonder what the status is for Crystal Reports in the future. Earlier we saw a demo of Euroscript which featured reports in widgets that changed when interacting with other widgets in the UI.

Future D2 releases:

  • Personalized home page
  • Ability to package components in xCP as widgets for D2
  • Data tables

When it comes to mobile in the short term:

  • iOS 6 platform support
  • Support for iPhone 5 (form factor adjustments)
  • D2 Workflow config in order to support electronic signature signoffs and adding notes and comments to a workflow task.

In the longer perspective they see mobile clients both leverage D2 and xCP configuration. Clients based on HTML 5 for multi-platform support. The ambition is to have mobile clients fully integrated with information management and governance.

 

 

EMC Momentum Vienna 2012: Public Sector

Posted on by alexandra

Tuesday at the conference was divided into three industry tracks: public sector, energy & engineering and healthcare. In addition to that a developer tracks and two unnamed ones. I choose to attend the public sector track for the first and last session of the day.

The day kicked of with Ronnen Ronnen who is the Vertical Solutions Director for Public Sector in EMEA. His session “Public Sector trends and vision” was an overview of the issues and trends in our area. The main features of his speech were:

  • eGov Mission Statement
  • Public Sector Challenges
  • IIG Strategy
  • Moving to Solutions

The main keywords for public sector seemed to be: services, processes, streamline, efficiency, simplification and re-engineering gov processes. Shrinking public sector budgets and needs to cut costs in IT seemed to be an important rationale. Depending on how you interpret things it seemed to be an IT perspective – minimize costs but what about deliver new capabilities rather than cheaper existing ones? Priorities for the public sector from this IT perspective was stated to be:

  • Data protection
  • Organisational restructuring
  • Administration change
  • Improving services delivery
  • Handling economic constraints
  • Regulatory compliance

To me it seem important to distinguish WHAT measure you take from the underlying reasons WHY you them. From an IT perspective there is a risk of just focusing on delivering what we do know or at least they way we work now in a more cost effective way. I wonder for how long it will be enough not improving what the business do while doing it more efficiently. It boils down to how big of a picture you want or can take. Is it just IT meaning boxes and software or  is it a more strategic take on how the organization does its business?

However, somethings need to be focused on the IT-perspective and relates to the actual ability to support the business with new IT-support, the time to market aspect is crucial not only to save money but also to make it in a reasonable time frame from the business perspetive. Ronnen summarized it like this:

“Sometimes the time to market is so long that when you deliver the people initiating it are no longer there”

That means a requirement to move to a more agile development process and of course the way Doumentum xCP is heading reflects that. They claim 5-10 times faster development cycles which really addresses these challenges. Other trends that adresses the challenges are:

  • Cost optimization
  • Alternative delivery models (cloud)
  • Shared services
  • Outsourcing
  • Joint private/public
  • Mobility
The afternoon session was labeled a roundtable session but unfortunately quite few people showed up in a fairly large room. That meant that some of the intensity of a big crowd was lost. We got an introduction from Ronnen followed by two customers talking about their experiences. Hong Kong Civil Service efficiency unit was interesting. He shared with us the current situation in Hong Kong where they have not been able to hire new civil service workers for the past 10 years. That means that the age structure is critical with around 50% of the workforce being over 45. In Hong Kong people can retire between 45 and 60 which means that a lot of experienced people will have to be replaced with young people with little or no experience. Preserving knowledge and best practice then becomes a key thing to do. They have chose to use EMC Documentum Centerstage to store all these SOPs and best practices and declare them as formal records from there. The idea is to move from a situation where these documents are spread on local computers and file shares into a centralised but sharable architecture. After all the goal is to support all these youngsters with information they need to continue to provide civil services to Hong Kong citizens. “Put information at work” was a term he liked to use.
Finally I like to mention a slide that Ronnen showed which was a pie chart outlining that 94% of the costs (that can be saved) are found in the processes rather than IT and software. So optimizing the way we work is the real way to save money and of course at the same time do more or better work.