At one of the meetings we had with EMC Managers I was asked to participate in their little video project called “A moment at Momentum” and of course I accepted. It is great to do stuff to strengthen the Momentum (Documentum) community at EMC World.
Tag: US
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!
EMC World 2009: Reflections from the Momentum conference
A very hectic week has passed by and EMC World 2009 is over. Just as I did last year I felt like reflecting a about the conference.
First of all many thanks to EMC for listening us and improving a lot of things from the last year. I have been to EMC World 07 and 08 and during both these occasions I felt a little lost as a Documentum customer among all these storage and virtualisation people. Back then I heard people referring with love to past Momentum conferences where the sense of community was there. In November 08 I had the chance to go to Momemtum in Prague as a speaker and it was actually a bit different from EMC World. Suddenly all the focus was on Documentum.
Things well done
So the establishment of a Content Management & Archiving (CMA) Community was just what we all needed. We all got yellow ribbons with text “Momentum” to attach to our badges which made us all much more visible to each other. We got all the sessions in the same area which meant no more running around and the chance to bump into people with those ribbons. Intead of having a very thick catalogue with all sessions merged together into a giant schedule we got our own CMA Show Guide which was really easy to use and made life much easier to me. Next to all the sessions we had a beautiful Momentum Lounge which was manned all day around. You could even meet CMA executives for drinks after sessions on Wednesday and Thursday. It had nice sofas and chairs togeter with soft red lighting which made it quite cosy. In the solutions exhibitions all CMA Booths were gathered in the same area with a separate graphic profile then the rest of the EMC booths. Around the CMA booth you found all the CMA partners co-located. Finally we had our own CMA Party on Monday evening which was well attended as far I saw. In addition to that we finally seem to have a working online community both for Documentum and XML Technologies.
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There was also a great thing to create a Blogger’s lounge where all people who blogged and Twittered could register. Outside the lounge there was a large screen displaying what we all were saying more or less live. And the Vanilla Latte served there was a life saver! On Tuesday their Barista started making mine as soon as I passed the entrance 🙂 What a service! I think EMC actually made social media into a working business tool here. Really something to build on. If you have not done it search for #emcworld on Twitter to see what it was all about.
I attened one Product Advisory Forum (PAF) around the new Enterprise Search Server (ESS) and that was a great experience. Ed Bueche and Aamir Farooq did a great job to inspire great discussions between us customers and the engineering team. I attended PAFs in Prague as well and those were also a great part of the conference.
We had access to wireless internet all around the conference area and that is vital for a conference like this. Especially for us who Blog and Tweet!
Things to improve
First of all EMC is a company which has a payoff saying “Where Information Lives” and touts itself as an information infrastructure company. I assume that all means digital information and is it something we Documentum people care about then it is information management. Then it does make a lot of sense taking notes and searching the web on a laptop computer during sessions. After all we are IT-nerds 🙂 Please get us some rooms with sufficient number of power outlets!
Why not even extend it further and use your own technology to integrate Tweets, Blog posts with the conference schedule so we more or less can interact live around sessions. It would even make sense for me at least to being able to register that I am attending a conference (voluntary of course) using the online profile community that alre which would make it even easier
There seem to be fewer sessions in general and especially I believe the number of developer oriented ones have become significantly fewer. I am not a coder myself so I actually think it makes sense to have sessions focused on people writing code and other with different advancement levels for us focusing on architectures, features and business cases. Another thing I noted is that there are no call for papers to EMC World the same way it works for Momentum (Europe). I think use cases from customers are an important part of the conference and it would be great to find a way to get them back in.
Please also have a look at what Word of Pie had to say about this year’s conference.
See you next year in Boston!