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

[Douglas E. Miles]

Hey Michael!  How's it going?  This will be used support and serve up 
our corporate website, so static content definitely won't cut it.  I'm 
still in the requirements/early evaluation stage here, but I thought I'd 
see if I can learn from the collective wisdom of the list. :)

Michael Friedman wrote:
> 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
> Phone: 650-725-1974                  Stanford University
> FAX:   270-721-8034                  <friedman at highwire.stanford.edu>
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