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EMC World 2010: DFS Real World Examples, Best Practices

I had planned to go to a session around the Documentum Roadmap but it was totally full so we had to go to another session. We split up and went to the BPM Fundamentals and the Documentum Foundation Services (DFS) Best Practices session by Michael Mohen instead. I am not a developer so this is a little from the 500ft level

He started by discussed the complementary nature between DFS and CMIS depending on how focused development is to only Documentum or not. CMIS is of course the new standard recently approved by OASIS. He argued that some applications like Records Management is still best done using DFS but I guess that also has to do with how people want CMIS to develop. As I understand it is not intended to contain ALL feature and the COMPLETE set of features in all ECM-systems and rather focus on the interoperabiltiy aspect of building ECM-apps based on multiple repositories.

When it comes to Content Transfer when using DFS the key considerations are latency, size of the file, formats and caching needs. Some of the ways to do content transfer is:

  • HTTP
  • Base64
  • UCF
  • MTOM

Most use UCF or MTOM  but it is important to remember that BOCS/ACS requires UCF to work. The message is to don’t be afraid to mix between HTTP, MTOM and others. In our solution we do use a mix but because we sometimes have rather large content size this of course an issue.

Notable changes in D6.5/D6.6

  • JBoss 4.2.0 is the new methods server
  • Apache Tomcat support
  • Aspect Support
  • LWSO support
  • Native 64-bit support and UCF Improvements
  • Kerberos is coming D6.6

Remote and local calls in Java – .Net does only provide remote calls

There are some applications that customers may not be aware of such as DFS Utilities developed by John sweeney, EMC and DFSX (Extension)

  • Provides utility classes
  • Based on DFS Object MOdel
  • Java-based 1.5 or greater
  • Only EAR-files today

Test Harness is JMeter extension which has custom JMeter Sampler built to invoke DFS using the Java Productivity Layer

Responsetimes collected for:

  • CreateObject
  • Get Object
  • Checkout object
  • Check in Object
  • Delete Object

Over a WAN DFS speeded up DFC especially when you have 300-400 ping times…use DFS because it is state-less. Relevant when using satellite links and such.

Sizing Calculator is soon available for DFS. It is an Excel spreadsheet. The sheet is sased on WSDL and SOAP so if we are using other designs results may vary of course.

In a speed test etween UCF and MTOM upload speeds under 50 Mb were similar. However, UCF was slightly faster. The cool part of UCF is that it is asynchronous which for instance mean that you can show one page of a document and continue loading the rest of it.

When it comes to ESB-implementations the message was that the majority of implementions is point-point for clients apps. However some have SAML for added security in their ESB implementation which affects speed a bit.

It seems that DFS is used a lot in a .Net environment and together with Sharepoint.

MOSS and DFS Examples

.Net 3.3

SDF and xCP

Webpart with an inbox rendered and Xform inside Sharepoint.

Another example is the use of DFS and Windows Explorer where some want custom integration for the Windows Desktop and essentially provides something like the old Document Desktop client. It is called DFS Explorer.

DFS Adobe Flex Example

There is an white paper available to provide a quickstart…read more about the session at the community page.

Adobe does not talk directly to DFS but through Java. Restful would much easier to use for Flex as well as most AJAX-implementations.

Best Practices

  • Leverage the SDK (.Net/Java interop layers)
  • Use UCF for BOCS/ACS
  • If you expected your query to exceed 500 you must cache and cycle through results.
  • DFS is better on WAN with poor latency.

A feature which is not well documented is to set requiresAuthentication=”false” on your annotated services implementation to browse through repositories and basic info such as data dictionary.

There is also a less known Services Catalog Viewer which is an optional install

  • Explore services available within the internet
  • DSCR is registry for consumer discover.
  • UDDI v2 standard
  • Standard Web app
  • Default port is 9010
  • Judy open source UDDI

You can also compare this with the notes from last conference by Word of Pie.

Next stop: EMC World 2010 in Boston

It is time again to enjoy the company of fellow ECM-people at EMC’s conference which is in Boston, MA this year. Although most of the conference are focused around their storage hardware there is a good “sub-conference” called Momentum where all the Documentum people gather to share experiences. I have said this before but this has so far been by far the best tech conference I have attended. Most sessions are very interesting and EMC is a fairly open company so you usually leave with a decent idea of where they are going for the next year. For us this is critical because sometimes what is in the next release dictates what kind of experiments we can run in our Battle Lab at Joint Concept Development and Experimentation Centre (JCDEC) back in Sweden.

I will try to blog and twitter as usual and I am registrered at the Blogger’s Lounge this year as well. Looking forward to some great vanilla latte there while trying to scribble down the latest from the sessions. At this wiki you can see who will be blogging from EMC World this year. Be sure to check it out because social media is great tool to get not only facts but also comments from people in the business. I guess the ECN Online Documentum community also will be a good place to find news from the conference.

And finally, I will be speaking about our experiences of integrating Documentum in a SOA-architecture to support an operational level military HQ. The speech will be at 11 am on Monday. Please stop and say hi if you can!

Reflections on our project from an Enterprise Search perspective

In a blog post called “Knowledge management: retrieve, visualize and communicate!” at their Findability blog the company Findwise reflects on the approach to Knowledge Management taken by the Knowledge Support project at JCDEC. It is inspired by the recent article in one of Sweden’s biggest technology magazines called Metro Teknik.

Simon Sineks golden circle highlights the “why”…

Martin Sjöman at the Design Planner blog has an interesting blog post reflecting on why the motivations behind the strategy of a certain company is so important. Since it is no secret that I am a devoted Mac-user I always find interesting to discuss the unique nature of Apple and their strategy for both design and marketing. I can really identify with the how the importance of relating to Apples conviction in realizing a vision for computing which makes me relate to WHY Apple is doing things the way they do. It is so much stronger than both HOW and WHAT they are doing. Something to think about in internal marketing efforts where I hope that the passion we have will be noticed and will bear fruit because people can relate to our conviction around Information and Knowledge Management.

Can BPM meet Enterprise 2.0 over Adaptive Case Management?

The project that I am running at JCDEC involves a lot of internal “marketing” targeting both at end users and people in charge of our IT-projects. Lately I have found myself explaning the difference between Workflow processes using Documentum Process Engine and Taskspace and what EMC’s new clients Centerstage Pro and Media Workspace. My best argument so far has been that BPM/Workflow is well suited for formal repeatable process in the HQ while Enterprise 2.0 clients takes care of ad-hoc and informal processess. Keith Swensson explains the Taylorism-based Scientific Management-concept as the foundation of Business Process Management in this blogpost in a good way. He continues to provide a bridge over to ad-hoc work that nowadays is done by what is called Knowledge Worker. Documentum Centerstage is a tool that is intended for the Knowledge Worker which also can be seen as the Enterprise 2.0 way of working.

However, Keith continues to steer us over to a concept called Adaptive Case Management which is supposed to address those more agile and dynamic ways of working as a contrast to slow-changing well-defined business processess that is deployed in traditional BPM-systems. To my understanding this focuses a lot on the fact that the user itself (instead of a Process designer) needs to be able to control templates, process steps and various other things in order to be able to support more dynamic work such as criminal investigations or medical care.

However, Adaptive Case Management is also a concept (I understand) in the book called “Mastering the Unpredictable”. The idea is to focus on the unpredictable nature of some work situations but also reflect a bit over to what degree things are unpredictable or not. In this presentation by Jacob Ulkeson the argument is that the main bulk of work is unpredictable and therefore also means that Process Modeling using traditional BPM most likely won’t work.

Some people have opinions that there is no need to redefine BPM and that all these three letter acronyms does not contribute much to the understanding of the problem and the solutions. I think I disagree and the reason for that is that there are no silver bullet products that covers everything that you need. Most organisations start somewhere and rolls out systems based on their most pressing needs. I believe that these systems have some similarities in what they are good and bad at. Having bought an ECM, BI, CRM or ERP-system usually says something about what business problems have been addressed. As SOA-architectures matures and the ambition to reduce stove-pipes increases it actually means that the complementary character of these systems matter. It also matters which of these vendors you choose because the consolidation efforts into a few larger vendors means choosing from different approaches.

To me all of this means an opportunity to leverage the strong points of different kind of platforms. Complex sure but if you have the business requirements it is probably better than building it from scratch. So I think when companies quickly rolls out Enterprise 2.0 platforms from smaller startup vendors they soon discover that they risk creating yet another stove-pipe but in this case consisting of social information. Putting E 2.0 capabilties on top of an ECM-platform than makes a lot of sense in order to be able to integrate social features with existing enterprise information. The same most likely goes for BI, CRM etc.

When it comes to BPM the potential lies in extending formal processess with social and informal aspects. However, it is likely that the E 2.0-style capabilities make new ways of working evolve and emerge. Sooner or later they need to be formalised maybe into a project or a community of interest. Being able to leverage the capabilties of the BPM-platform in terms of monitoring and some kind of best practice in form of templates is not far-fetched. To some degree I believe that Adaptive Case Management-solutions sometimes should be used instead of just a shared Centerstage Space because you need this added formal aspects but still want to retain some flexibility. Knowledge Worker-style work can then be done on top of a BPM-infrastructure while at the same time utilising the ECM-infrastructure for all content objects involved in the process. Having a system like Documentum that is good at content-centric human workflow processes makes a lot of sense.

So is the Documentum xCP a way to adress this middle-ground between Process Modeling-based processes and Knowledge Worker-style support in CenterStage? The mantra is “configure instead of coding” which implies a much more dynamic process. I have not played around with xCP yet – we have so far only deployed processes developed from scratch instead of trying out the case management templates that comes with the download.

Not all companies want to do this but I think some will soon see the merits of integrating ECM, BI, E.2.0 and BPM/ACM-solutions using SOA. The hard part I belive is to find software and business methods support for the agile and dynamic change management of these systems. The key to achieve this is to be able to support various degrees of ad-hoc work where on one the user does everything herself and on the other way a more traditional developer coding modules. Being able to more dynamically change/model/remodel not only processess but also the data model for content types in Documentum is a vital capability to be able to respond to business needs in a way that maintains trust in the system. This is not a task by IT but something done by some kind of Information and Knowledge Management (IKM) specialist. They can get some proper means of doing their work using this SOA-based integration of different sets of products.

So employ E 2.0-style features in Task Management clients and make sure that E 2.0 style clients include tasks from BPM/ACM in their activity streams or unified inboxes. Make sure that all of this is stored in an ECM-platform with full auditing capabilities which needs to be off-loaded to a data warehouse so it can be dynamically analysed using interactive data visualisation, statistics and data mining. I hope we can show a solutions for that in our lab soon.

Night photography

Nattfotograferingstest
I have just got myself a new camera (Canon 970IS) and I decided that even though it is a small compact that I wanted to try it out at night. So I took my video tripod and walked around my little island and snapped a few pictures. It is amazing what different lighting can do to the mood of a city.

Exhausting console gaming

I follow the technological development of most things which has to do with computers and IT as close as I can. Naturally I read a lot about the Nintendo Wii gaming console when it was introduced. It was clear that Nintendo chose to not continue the fight for the most powerful gaming console with Sony and Microsoft. Instead they focused on the gaming experienced and introduced a new set of motion-sensitive controls couple with fun games which made you move the hand control instead of pushing buttons.

A few days after Christmas I went to visit Sören and Daniel who lives very close to very I grew up. A couple of other people where also there and one of them had brough her Nintendo Wii game so it became a good chance to try it out. We played ski slalom, snowboard, ski jump, “steer the bubble” but also tennis and boxing and it was so fun and exhausting. It was way more fun than I thought and much more exhausting. After 3×3 min of boxing I completely crashed in the sofa panting like I had been running 400 meters or something. Earlier I had thought really hard to get myself a Playstation 3 mainly to get the combination of a gaming console and a Bluray player but after playing Wii it became harder to choose. I would really need to do the excercises bundled with the board to improve my coordination. Two days after I had still sore muscles 🙂

The first Stargate SG-1 movie is available for pre-order

It was really a sad moment when I saw the last episode of Stargate SG-1 but now the first feature-length movie is on its way! It is called Stargate The Ark of Truth and it is available for pre-order here at the UK Amazon Site.

I am so looking forward to April 14 when it is released. The other day I caught my favourite actor Amanda Tapping on a short 15 min experimental movie and I realised again how talented she is an actor. There is also an audio interview with her available from her fan site.
Fortunately, I can also enjoy both the Stargate feeling and Amanda Tapping on Stargate Atlantis where she plays the expedition head.

I have a company!

Over the past year I have got some requests to do lectures about my experiences in life and also to produce documentary movies. So I decided it was time to start my own little company. I guess I should have done this years ago but the paper work always seemed so daunting. This time a friend of mine was about to start her own company and since she was focusing on offering accounting services it seemed like a good fit.

So now it is all done and it is called:

The Right Kind of Fruit

Which I thought was really clever since there are a somewhat obvious (depending how well you know me) reference to my favorite brand, Apple. The next project will be to set up my website.

So if you want me to come to you to talk about my experiences from being a transsexual send me an email. I usually try to talk about it in a broader perspective with reflections on gender, collective norms and how we relate to them as human beings.

Gua’uld langauge…

It isn’t as advanced as JRR Tolkien’s languages or Klingon for that matter but it is interesting the Stargate fans has compiled a lot of information about the Gua’uld language spoken by the Gua’uld and the Jaffa.

I guess one of the reasons why I like Stargate SG-1 is that it is a lot about the danger that arises when a large number of people left their destiny in the hands of false gods who use advanced technology to perform “miracles”. It begins with the enslavement of ancient Egypt by the Gua’uld and later with the preechers of the Ori who kills everybody who do not believe. Of course the rest of the component in the show about the possibility of contact with life on other planets and how to react to different ways of living the life. Of course all of that is present here on earth but the added mixture of different life forms, advanced technology and huge distances makes it even more exciting.