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

[Bobby Metz]

Doug,
    Been away from the list for quite awhile.  Curious as to what your company went with.  Also, if they haven't decided, I would suggest you avoid Exponent.  That's the only CMS I have any experience with and I found it terrible.  It's based on MySQL and Perl/PHP but I found the documentation so lacking that it was just too difficult to learn how to customize IMO.

Bobby

----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Douglas E. Miles 
  To: Michael Friedman 
  Cc: phoenix-pm at pm.org 
  Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2008 5:21 PM
  Subject: Re: [Phoenix-pm] OT - "Enterprise" content management systems


  I left out a "to".  Place wherever is most entertaining. :)  I need to quit returning email when I'm in a hurry.

  Douglas E. Miles wrote: 
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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