[Phoenix-pm] OT - "Enterprise" content management systems

Michael Friedman friedman at highwire.stanford.edu
Thu Jan 31 14:21:54 PST 2008


Back when I used to work with FileNet we competed against Documentum. Now 
I think they bought them, but that was many years ago.

Anyway, at that point, Documentum specialized in read-only documents. 
You'd put things into the system and then could easily change metadata 
about them, but not the documents themselves. Changing the documents 
themselves was a pain. I would hope they've moved on from there, but I 
admit I haven't looked recently.

However, building on Scott's point, you should do a serious requirements 
analysis before picking even the category of "large content management 
systems". It could be you only need something for web-based content or 
could use a wiki with a proper set of roles/authorization groups or 
something like Subversion. (Or, my favorite, Trac, which combines a wiki, 
web access to a SVN repository, and a request tracking system. It's 
written in Python, but for development groups it's way cool.)

If what you really need instead is workflow management, there are also 
other products out there for that market. Reviews and approvals, that sort 
of thing. Heck, PDF has those capabilities built-in these days.

Anyway, good luck! I'd like to know what you end up with, because I'm 
probably going to try again to get my company to get a better 
documentation repository within the next few months. (It's an annual 
thing. I keep losing, but I am persistent.)

-- Mike

On Thu, 31 Jan 2008, Scott Walters wrote:

> Hey Doug,
>
> I didn't have to work with any of these directly, but I worked
> with people who did, at Mot*rola.  My take on it is they're
> all like aspirin... by the time you really need them to the
> point where you'll go get one and use it, it's past the
> point where it's strong enough to do any good.
>
> If you need a content management system, you have a lot of data,
> a lot of people accessing it, a lot of revisions, interdependencies,
> etc.  And then you need more than what a CMS has to offer.
> If you start on it before you need it, you might have a chance.
> A lot of people (and myself only second hand) are of the opinion
> that they basically aren't worth the bother.
>
> I wonder if you could do something completely custom and minimal
> and wind up with more flexibility and utility... work operations
> tend to be strongly tied to the org chat.  If the org chat,
> including work flow (who reports to who on what, including
> ad hoc but long running relationships), and each person had
> documents just throw out there (essentially ugo+r documents
> in their file share), if a browser for those relationships wouldn't
> would better.  If it's a call center, something else.  Or
> manufacturing, something else again.
>
> Oh well.  Just a thought.
>
> Good luck.
>
> -scott
>
> On  0, "Douglas E. Miles" <perlguy at earthlink.net> wrote:
>> All,
>>
>> This is somewhat off topic.  Does anybody out there have any experience
>> with so-called Enterprise content management systems?  I'm talking about
>> systems from Interwoven, Vignette, Documentum, etc.  I'd like to hear
>> about any recommendations or good/bad experiences.  To make this more on
>> topic:  I'm especially interested to hear if Interwoven's TeamSite still
>> uses Perl.  The only information I can find is from 5-6 years ago.  If
>> it does, and it meets our other criteria, I'd certainly love to make a
>> case for it. :)  Thanks!
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Michael Friedman                     HighWire Press
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