Category: Technology

It is not about techonology…actually it is.

Posted on by alexandra

I recently read a post written by Andrew McAfee who is an Associate Professor at the Harvard Business School. It made me think of my own retoric a bit. I guess everybody agrees that IT is here to support the business and not vice versa. However, in real life situation I often find myself in somewhat of a missionary role. We all want to be able to work smarter, solve our problems quicker and all of that. The question is how that is possible without knowing the possibilities of existing and emerging technologies. All historic references also point out that when a new technology arrives we have a tendency to just integrate it into what we do know as merely and add-on. It takes years before someone figures out how to do business different not just a little bit better.

Therefore in my evangelism I often find myself saying: “Well, it is not about technology, really, it is about business/processes” or something else which sound like “soft” issues. The idea is to make it easier for those non-technical people that they need to be engaged in this and not just expect us to install yet another black box which do magic stuff they do not understand. Well, professor McAfee made me think I was wrong. Maybe I should say: “it is about the technology, also”.

The idea is that if the leaders do not understand or do not even care how the systems we are buying for the company or organization how will they be able to develop their organization, their methods and make things run more efficient. When more and more of the things you need to monitor and control resides within ERP-, ECM- or CRM-systems they need to know how they work on some level. Especially when facing a need for change which can be facilitated by taking a new approach on the IT-infrastructure. Platforms from different vendors ARE different and not caring about that can prove very costly in the long run. Platforms also do change and it is vital to track that in order to know if to stay in the boat or jump onto  the next one. Technical understandning of these complex systems is vital and the way they are architected can possibly influence they way thousands of people work.
So, it is not all about technology but it certainly does matter what is happening in the black box.

Bad weather in Munich

Posted on by alexandra

It was nice to be out on the road again. I had never been to München before and on Tuesday night we had some time to explore the city somewhat. The weather was terrible – cold and raining. Not what I had expected because the last time I was in Germany this time of the year it was terribly hot instead. However, I have now officially been inside a traditional beer hall. It wasn’t as scary as I had first thought, I guess it was nicer and friendlier than I had expected.

Workwise we visited the iAbg complex outside München where we had a workshop within the MNE 5 project. What strikes me is the importance of understanding the Service Oriented Approach (SOA) even in our line of business. However, defining what a service actually is and what services that should be described in the technical architecture is not easy.

iPhone

Posted on by alexandra

The product that so many Mac-users have been waiting for has now been launched and what a launch it was. I especially like the story about Steve Wozniak waiting in line with a specially designed t-shirt stating “the line starts here”. However, it is again very interesting to listen to people and media trying do their best of making the iPhone an irrelevant “hype thing”. There seem to be an almost Microsoft-like incentive to crack down on anything Apple is doing today with some simple arguments around “what’s new, actually, it is not exactly the first phone around”. To me that is just missing the point or perhaps a blindness of abvious flaws of current products in the market. I own a Sony Ericsson P990i and it is a phone that have all the features when reading the specifications. Fine, but it is a terrible user experience. There seem to have been little or no usability testing and the updates they send out does not seem to fix anything. To me that counts and that is what Apple seem to have a good job fixing. Just as it is a bit more fun and easy to use a Mac, I believe it is more fun and easy to use an iPhone. Apple IS good at creating a spin and a hype but unlike Microsoft the actual products they sell are great and not full of bugs. The reason for that is that Steve Jobs strive for perfection and that kind of corporate culture do count in the long run.

As a sidenote, if you want to have a look at Alfresco on the iPhone have a look here

The Apple TV isn’t so bad after all…

Posted on by alexandra

I recently decided to buy an Apple TV to use together with my LCD projector. I had gotten tired of using my laptop as the playback device since I always had to move cables around. Thought it would be good to have everything permanently setup for once. Earlier I had some doubts about the Apple TV since it is a bit crippled compared to other solutions out there including using an old Xbox with the hacked media center application. But buying something from Microsoft to my home seemed a little bit too much for a Mac-person like me. The main drawback of the Apple TV is of course the limited set of codecs it supports. However, that turned out to not be a big factor when I discovered VisualHub which is a great media transcoding application. It eats a lot of useful formats and has presets for converting to the Apple TV or an iPod and even adds the content to the iTunes library. So when everything is converted it is automagically synched to the harddrive of my Apple TV and is ready to watch.

The image quality is great even on my big screen. I use component cables now and the 720p PAL resolution and for HD-encoded clips it looks just great. The interface is very good looking and it show it comes from Apple which I really like. The recent updates also adds content from YouTube and it also works just fine. Even there the image quality surprised me. Not as good as the HD-clips I have of course but not that much worse than standard resolution TV sometimes.

Documentum 6 looks really promising

Posted on by alexandra

EMC World 2007 have come to an end and I am almost exhausted after many intensive sessions on different parts of the Documentum platform. And platform is the right word since there a large number of products/modules available that makes it possible set up the system to do just anything. Documentum 6 is of course a major release and there are many improvements. The user interface in WebTop have gotten a much needed redesign and now supports shortcut keyboard commands, right-click, multiselect and even better drag-and-drop. One cool feature is to drag a file from the desktop onto a file and WebTop automatically senses that you would like to do a check-in from file. Documentum Transformation Services have also seen an overhaul with new UI:s for managing transformation and editing profiles as well as a new component called XML Transformation Services using XSL-FO. Really powerful for automating publishing. Architecturewise (for the WebTop) the JNI have been taking away in favour for a pure Java solution that makes deployment better and more standardized. No more special installers for WebTop! Performance is also said to be better. Taskspace is also a welcome addition since it provides a streamlined view for people performing actions withing different workflows. Includes better sorting/filtering/searching as well as an embedded viewer for PDF and images. The search interface has also been improved and now features faceted navigation using what EMC calls clusters which is something I really look forward using. Finally I like to highlight the fact that Eclipse is now the preferred development environment for Documentum which means that we will see apps like Documentum Application Builder go away. Even more interesting stuff is coming in version 6.5 and the hints we got of Documentum 7 looks even more promising.

I also need to say something about the conference in general. It was incredibly well organized and I am amazed how they move 7000 people around with such ease. I can recommend it for anyone interesting in the nuts and bolts of Documentum.

Enterprise Content Management on Mac OS X Server

Posted on by alexandra

Today I have an article posted on a Swedish Macsite called www.macpro.se which focuses on professional Mac-users. It explores the concept of ECM and points out the open-source solution Alfresco as a good alternative for Mac-users. Unfortunately the big ECM-vendors in the market do not support Mac OS X on the serverside.

Idag har jag artikel om avancerade dokumenthantering publicerad på sajten www.macpro.se

Alternativen för ECM på Mac OS X Server är tyvärr inte jättemånga. Dock börjar förutsättningarna för detta komma i och med att Apple anammar fler och fler standarder. Idag går det t.ex. att köra såväl Oracle som Sybase som databasmotor och som applikationsserver för J2EE fungerar t.ex. JBoss bra. Med Apples Unix-baserade operativsystem är Macen igen aktuell även för affärskritiska lösningar som jag ser det. XServe är också klart konkurrenskraftig vad gäller pris och prestanda jämfört med t.ex. motsvarande server från Dell. Open source-plattformen Alfresco är idag ett mycket bra alternativ för de som vill ha en ECM-plattform med officiellt stöd för Mac OS X Server.

EMC World

Posted on by alexandra

Sitting an huge hall now and listening to the EMC World keynote together with thousands of other people. This facitility is absolutley monstrous in its size. I will post a picture from the breakfast hall later on. Well, back to the keynote. It deals a lot of with the nature of information and the huge amount of information that we in the world create today. This year we will create information the size of 3 million times all the books ever written and by 2010 it will have expanded to almost a zetabyte. EMC as a storage company of course see its role in this area especially when information need to be managed in some way. Deals with both security, versioning, rights management and much more. The keynote is so far ok but I am unfortunately spoiled with the way Steve Jobs does his keynotes and this is no way near that.
Looking forward to hearing a lot about the new features in Documentum ver 6 this afternoon.

You can find a short video of it here

Folksonomies and why they matter for the enterprise

Posted on by alexandra

Formal taxonomies have been around for a long time. Librarians have maintained them and put great pride in cautiously adapting them. Everybody who have tried to develop and maintain a set of metadata know that it is as vital as it is hard to keep it up to date with needs of the organization. It is easy to always be one step behind. However, the latest developments around what has been described as Web 2.0 services have brought on a new concept called folksonomies which in essence is a taxonomy created dynamically by all users of a sight. The popular terms at Flickr is one example of one. So that means that we can “let people loose” and forget about the idea of a centrally managed taxonomy.

No, the cool part is that taxonomies and folksonomies can be combined. That way all the creative power of all users can be harnessed and a steady inflow of needed changes will arrive at the taxnomists desk. The challenge is to be able to connect terms in taxonomy with the keywords in the folksonomy. The people at Siderean have an interesting example of how to do that. It has apparently been used to power Oracle’s new semantic pages at OTN.

Enterprise search AND Enterprise Content Management not OR

Posted on by alexandra

The first day of the Enterprise Search Summit here in New York city was interesting. Enterprise Search vendors have a tendency to promote search as an alternative to ECM-platforms. One of the most clear messages today was the opposite – both technologies are needed and the effort should be put on integration instead. Further on the level of intergration options between search and ECM is rather limited today. A lot of more work should be done on this by the different vendors so that these two kind of platforms can start complementing each other.

Another interesting session covered taxonomies and how to manage them. It turned out that there are several taxonomy management systems out on the market. They look really promising but I am a bit afraid of the level of integration with different ECM-systems.

To the US again

Posted on by alexandra

Today I am leaving for the US again. I always look forward to go there and I have been fortunate to do that several times a year for a few years now. This time we will first go to New York City for the Enterprise Search Summit at the Hilton and then to Orlando, Florida for EMC World 2007 Momentum conference. I look forward to both of them because with last years experiences in mind I believe we have a lot of opportunities to finding how more about how to solve our needs for information and knowledge management.

The Enterprise Search Summit will start with one day of workshops and then followed by two days of more formal presentations. All, I mean all big companies in the Enterprise Search Business are there.

EMC World’s Momentum conference is the main conference where all users of Documentum meet to learn about the latest of that particular platform. I look forward to hearing more about the next release (ver 6 – “D6”) of Documentum. A lot of exciting new features and technologies that we need to understand in order to see how and if they fit in our strategies.

http://www.emcworld2007.com/momentum.html

http://www.enterprisesearchsummit.com/