May, 2007 | Content Perspective

Month: May 2007

Nice flight back home – in business class

Posted on 2007/05/28 by alexandra

On Sunday we left a warm and sunny Orlando to go back to Stockholm via Chicago. At the Orlando International Airport we just had to spend a few more dollars on NASA stuff in their new airport shop. I bought a pink and grey NASA t-shirt 😉

When we checked in at the counter at O’Hare international airport they just swapped our boarding cards for new ones and told us we had been given a complementary upgrade to Business class. I was so happy about this – not so much about the better food and so but for the comfort of being able to lay down more or less completely. Even if I can sit for a few hours on a soft chair now, spending 8+ hours in an aircraft chair is still uncomfortable. So the trip back home turned out to be a wonderful experience. SAS have installed a new chair called the Business Sleeper in their aircraft and they are just wonderful. I did some work on my computer (power for the computer is in the chair) adn then put my chair into sleeping mode and actually managed to get a few hours of sleep. The food was just great by the way. For starters we had grilled marinated prawns with mango salsa and for the main course I selected lamb loin with Dijon mustard crest with Red Bliss potatoes, sautéed mixed mushrooms and mustard sauce. We arrived a little early to a rainy and cold Arlanda where a friend of mine met me with my car.

EPCOT Segway Tour

Posted on 2007/05/26 by alexandra

I have been to Walt Disney World (WDW) for four years in a row now and even though I still love it there is always nice to find something new that I have not seen before. One of these things are the special backstage tours that Disney offers to experienced Disney guests who want to see and do some more. Last week we did the special tour in Magick Kingdom called “Keys to the Kingdom” and today it was time for the 2 hour Segway Experience in the World Showcase area of EPCOT.

I have been on a Segway before and enjoyed it very much so I really looked forward to this tour. It started with the mandatory safety slides and signing a paper about Disney´s liabilities if an injury should occur. Then we went to the Segways in the indoor training area where we practised turning and going back and forth in a very rigor training program. We finished off running a slalom course and a ramp excercise before it was time to head out amongst people.

The first part of the EPCOT park was open to the public (this was 10 am in the morning) but the World Showcase was still closed off and that is where we were heading. It was just as wonderful as I had remembered and even more fun now with the second generation Segways which has steering built-in as a lever rather than turning a knob. Experience the big World Showcase area on a Segway suddenly made everything smaller and distances shorter and it was great to be almost alone out there. Normally it is packed with people. The guide led us through some small obstacles which was fun and then stopped in Germany, Italy, Marocco, USA and finally France to give us some more detailed facts of what the buildings in respective countries where representing.

At the Disney MGM Studios

Posted on 2007/05/25 by alexandra

Today we visited Disney´s MGM Studios and had great fun there. We also tried Disney´s photopass service which is based on a small card with 2D barcode that you carry around. Whenever you see an official Disney photographer you just hand them the card, they snap an image or two and it gets tagged for upload at a website later. Even though I am still a bit tender after my surgery I decided that we just had to ride the Rockn’ Rollercoster Ride. It is a great indoor rollercoster with an Aerosmith theme. After the ride I had my photo taken and as you can see some extra Magic was added 🙂 We finished off the evening with the wonderful show called Fantasia at the Hollywood Hills Amphitheatre. It is a wonderful show with water, projections, lasers, smoke, fire and lots more in front of a crowd of 10 000 people.

Documentum 6 looks really promising

Posted on 2007/05/25 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 2007/05/23 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 2007/05/21 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

In Orlando Florida again

Posted on 2007/05/17 by alexandra

Woke up rather early today to get moving down to Florida again. We started by eating an all american breakfast at the Red Flame on 44th street. Even though it is really not the healthiest food on the planet I like to treat myself that for a few times when I am in the States. It is something particular with these benches and enourmous oval plates with omelettes and hash browns. After that we got a car to the airport, a huge black SUV. Felt almost like riding a Secret Service van 🙂 The flight down to Orlando was fine even though Continental had oversold the plane (again!) but we had not trouble getting on after a few people gave up their seat for a later plane.

Back in Orlando we took the Mears shuttle and it was such a nice feeling to be back at the Gaylord Palms Resort again. In the picture I am standing in front of the basin where one of the hotel´s restaurant is located. It is on the big sailing boat in the background. Yes, it is indoor!

Folksonomies and why they matter for the enterprise

Posted on 2007/05/16 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 2007/05/15 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.

5th Avenue Apple Store

Posted on 2007/05/13 by alexandra

Today we arrived in New York and the weather was just great. The sun was shining and the temperature was rather warm, like an early summer day in Sweden. We decided to take a walk in Central Park and everywhere people were relaxing and sun-bathing on the green lawns. After the park we ended up in corner at the 5th Avenue Apple Store, you know the one with just a big glass-cube with the Apple logo in it. The actual store is below the street level. It was wonderful to see the stream of people going down the glass staircase. Apple products are really popular.