MemorableURL.com

What would you do with commoditized ECM ? Virtual Documents

This is one in a series of articles [one, two, three] that consider how consumers (the general public) might utilize ECM if it were provided as a convenient (and inexpensive) service. Rather than looking for the single big scenario I am trying to justify each of the ECM specific features in a consumer context.

In the overview I list features of ECM; in this posting I’m considering one specific feature: Virtual Documents.

For those of you who have not seen Virtual Documents in use I’ll list their high-level features.[1]

• Containerization: You create a container – similar to a folder. You can link documents into the folder. You can either link a specific version (say V1.3) of the document into the container or link to a ‘symbolic version’ (current, latest, approved, etc.) The documents can have a specific order.
• Hierarchy: A container can contain other containers giving you a full hierarchy of containers and documents.
• Quantum Existence: Documents and containers can exist simultaneously in other places which allows you to display the same content in different structures depending on the usage model.
• Snapshots: At any time you can take a “snapshot “ of the entire structure which you can go back to independently of the fact that documents and structures have changed since the snapshot was taken.
• Publishing: You can publish the entire structure as a single object (complex PDF, zip,etc.)

So, who in their right mind would want to use this at home?

My wife, that’s who; my wife is a teacher and teachers maintain lesson plans . A year long lesson plan consists of a collection of teaching and testing materials, it might also contain information related to students’ progress. The documents are organized by subject, by teaching period, by grade, etc..

If these lesson plans were stored in a virtual document you could do the following:

• Containerization: The component lesson materials could be linked into containers in a structured and ordered way. This isn’t rocket science but it leads on to the following:
• Hierarchy: It is possible to arrange the same content in different structures to represent different ways of slicing the view. One virtual structure might represent all of the content for a specific grade; another might represent the content for a grade split per marking period. The relationship can get quite complex but when looking at any one piece of the hierarchy it just shows those documents that are in scope for that view.
• Quantum Existence: Ignoring my feeble attempt at theoretical physics humor this is one of the more interesting areas. If the hierarchy above is set up correctly and the documents are bound into the right structures then editing any one document will be reflected in all of the right places in real time. No synchronization is required, no orphaned copies of content exist.
• Snapshots: Imagine that the teacher stores scanned images of the test results in the structure. (S)he would be able to create a snapshot of the entire structure at the end of each year, delete all of the results and start the next year with a clean set of lesson plans. At any time in the future (s)he would be able to come back to the snapshot and look at that year’s results and the exact versions of the documents presented to the students.
• Publishing: Not sure that I have a good use case for this but I’m ok with it not being a 100% fit.

I’m not proposing that this is a huge market or that this is even a real commercial opportunity but I think it illustrates a way of thinking about ‘commoditized ECM’ that we typically do not think about.

Next I need to think about whether I could sell my wife and her esteemed colleagues other ECM features…

Got any other ideas? Put them in the comments or email them to me directly at [email protected] 

---

[1] A word of warning, the feature that SharePoint 2010 calls Virtual Documents do not support most of these capabilities. SharePoint’s virtual documents are more like ‘smart folders’. Don’t try this at home if you are using SharePoint.

What would you do with commoditized ECM ? The details.

In my previous posts [one, two] on this topic I was thinking about how you might position and sell ECM into a consumer market as a service. I had little luck painting this picture but I have been thinking about the problem from a slightly different angle.

Many of the ideas that people have suggested could be solved using cloud storage and maybe a database. Generally they fall into the ‘store it in the Web and allow consumers to create relationships between the content’ category. Obviously you could do this with a content management system but you could do it without one too.

So here’s my theory; firstly, I need to decompose ECM into those constituent parts that differentiate it from simple storage, archiving or just a content enabled application. For example, the following are things that you can only effectively do with a real ECM system:

• Basic Library Services
  • Create and delete content
  • Complex version management
• Complex virtual document structures
  • Ordered lists of objects with hierarchy
  • Early & late bound version linking into the structure
  • The ability to take and retain a snapshot of the structure
  • Content being linked simultaneously to multiple places in a structure
• Rendition management
  • The ability to store multiple renditions of an object that are bound to the object
  • Rendition management & creation
  • Thumbnail management
  • Delivery of specific rendition based on context
• Retention, Audit and Disposition
  • Ability to specify a retention policy and protect content under retention
  • Audit of all operations on the content including download/read
  • Structured Disposition
• Lifecycle management
• Workflow, Business Process Management/Analytics

…The list goes on

So, here’s the crux of my theory. If I cannot come up with reasons why a ‘consumer’ would care even remotely about these features then there probably isn’t a good model for selling direct ECM to consumers. That’s not to say that you might not embed ECM within a consumer app but probably 2 levels abstracted from the user.

My challenge is to come up with use cases that a consumer would understand and care about that use these features.

Please help…I’m kicking it off with the one use case for Virtual Documents that I’ve come up with so far. Got any ideas for others? Put them in the comments or email them to me directly at [email protected]

Momentum Lisbon – Thoughts…

In general I think that this was the best Momentum Europe that I’ve attended. I’d probably even suggest that it was one of the best Momentum/EMC World conferences I can remember in 13 years of attending them. The energy level just seemed to be higher than I expected, people asked really great questions and seemed to be genuinely excited to hear what was going on with the technology and the strategy.

For the last few years we at IIG (or CMA or Documentum) have been taking some hits over not having a coherent strategy – or at least not being able to express it clearly. I cannot comment on those accusations because I actually want to keep my job but I will say this: for the first time in a while I was able to connect the dots from Mark Lewis’ vision to Rick Devenuti’s strategy to Whitney Tidmarsh’s delivery comments to Jeetu Patel’s industry-vision presentation. More importantly I was able to map what I am doing from the lowly depths of product development to each and every one of those presentations. This isn’t surprising, Mark set out a lofty vision 3 years ago and it has taken this long for us to turn the IIG mega-tanker to that heading and to prime the bilge pumps to start spewing out actual product…I’m thinking that the mega-tanker & bilge pump analogy might not have been a good choice considering our huge emphasis on product quality! Oh well, too late.

When I was a Documentum customer (it really was Documentum then) I used to relish the technical sessions – Craig Randall, Ed Bueche and Chase Harris’s respective sessions. It seemed that we were back to those days again this week. I did not attend Rohit Ghai and Jeroen van Rotterdam or Ed’s sessions but they were obviously back to the good old days. If you don’t believe me then trawl through the #MMTM10 tweets and you’ll see the trend.

FWIW, I did attend the xPlore session and that stuff looks very cool. Once thing that I loved is a page you can go to where it shows you the queries that took the longest time to execute. Imagine how many hours you’d spend trawling through log files to find that information… I know that I am missing almost every important point related to xPlore but that one just caught my attention!

Anyway, if you didn’t make it to Momentum you can watch the sessions on Virtual Momentum, not sure how or what that costs (forgive me marketing) but I’ll try to remember to add a link to the site if I remember. I’m on the flight home now so I am sans-internet.

Next year Momentum 2011 will be hosted in Berlin – this was a well-kept secret…at least it would have been except it was printed on the back of the conference program ;-)