Seasons of Collaboration

My thoughts about Collaboration

2010-05-15T00:44:00.000-07:00

Some weeks ago I stumbled over a quote, not sure if in a tweet or a blog. The quote said that the user interface to each content management should be a collaboration tool.

I liked this quote since collaboration is what I professionally do since ten years now. The best collaboration platform ten years ago was eRoom, no question. eRoom succeeded over a large number of competitors. The name of the competitors got lost in the history, Sharepoint was not there at this time.

It is not easy to make the key reason for the success of eRoom out. There might be a couple of things that generated such a good solution in combination:

The slick user interface
The eaze of use
Drag and Drop
The delegation concept for management tasks

All in one eRoom was a good solution which made it easy to contribute.

eRoom was and is used as a content management solution. Since it offered most features that a end user would expect from a content management system, eRoom never did a good job in delivering content management.
Lots of content management feature that are expected by enterprises are missing in eroom.
There are no true federations, the repository is not well designed, search is weak, there is no synchronization and no deduplication, there is no classification, no renditions and much more.
This resulted in a situation where most eRoom installations got messed up and got maintenance monsters with tons of data in it where nobody knows if the data is valuable or could be deleted. A good content management use case, or?

eRoom Inc. just was in the process of starting the work on eRoom 8 when documentum took over that Boston based company. The integration for eRoom into the Documentum looked like a perfect match. I don’t want to point to the awful webtop user interface here.
So Documentum made an important step for the future of the eRoom product. A third party eRoom/Documentum integration was bought and brought to market. This integration later was integrated into eRoom 7 and is known now as Documentum Connector which upgrades eRoom to eRoom Enterprise.
I was ever wondering how Documentum wanted to integrate eRoom into their own platform. This was never a technical question, since from the technical point of view such an integration is easy. The question was more about the product design since the philosophy of the products is too different.
The things that made eRoom great would never fit into the philosophy of Documentum and vice versa. The final decision was to build a collaboration platform from scratch which is now known as CenterStage.

CenterStage was created to fit the collaboration concept into documentum. It was a product that aligns the strategy of Documentum as an ECM vendor with collaboration. Not easy to do. I don’t want to asks about the compromises that had to be done during the design process.

Andre Goodale explained yesterday at Laurence Hart’s blog that features like blogs, RSS feeds, tagging, federated search and more could make a good collaboration. I disagree with that.

All these features are good to expose content from a content management tool to users. So these features are good when a user wants to browse the enterprise content. But collaboration means more. It means that users work together. So the most important thing for a collaboration solution should be to generate an environment that encourages users to work together. This is something I can see for eRoom but not for CenterStage.
There is not much to do to get CenterStage to that point: adding drag and drop (very important), Simplifying the user interface and an improved performance are a leap into the right direction. However, I would expect more features that make CenterStage a better repository browser rather than a better collaboration tool in the next future.

This all depends from a point of view. If you look to it from the Documentum/Webtop side then CenterStage probably looks like a good collaboration tool that could replace Webtop. If you look to it from the eRoom side it looks like a pain because of the many things that got lost. I am confident that feature parity would not make CenterStage to a better collaboration tool, it just enables existing eRoom owners to perform a migration.

Collaboration is not about features and nothing about feature parity with eRoom.

Collaboration is not repository browsing

Collaboration is contribution.

This leads me to a inconvenient conclusion: CenterStage will not be the next generation collaboration tool, it will be the next generation content browser (Webtop).

If you look to the enterprises, where Sharepoint will be the collaboration tool for the next couple of years and take the quote from above where a collaboration tool is be the interface to content management then it is hard to see where CenterStage fit into the next generation content management setup for the enterprise.

The future of CenterStage

2010-05-14T14:28:00.000-07:00

Today I had a interesting read on Laurence Hart’s blog.

He is missing a strategy for CenterStage from EMC. Andre Goodale has already responded to the post.

Sad, but it is hard to envision a future for CenterStage in a world where EMC does not pushing the product anymore and where Sharepoint seems to fill that gap.

It hurts if you think about where EMC collaboration team is coming from. eRoom was market leader, and we still have customers that keep buying eRoom licences over Sharepoint. However, that market leader position was lost with the decission to drop eRoom for CenterStage. Remember, eRoom did not receive any product development the last couple of years.

Now with CenterStage EMC is not longer the market leader, it is a newcomer. This newcomer product is lacking support from the corporate strategy. And this lack, probably, will define the way that CenterStage will go in the coming number of years.

I respect the hard work of the team around of Andrew but I assume this will be not enough when it is not aligned with the corporate strategy.

The Enterprise 2.0 buzz

2010-03-04T10:55:00.001-08:00

To be honest, I don't get the buzz around the Enterprise 2.0 hype.

I am doing now collaboration since 10 years. I started with eRoom when this part of collaboration was called project management. The term was a fail and rapidly changed to project collaboration. This was a better term, but later it was reduced to collaboration to make clear that collaboration does not only happen along projects.

Collaboration is a valid term for this market segment and accepted for years.

When I read a article about Enterprise 2.0 there is nothing new in it. All phrases, charts, use cases are the same that can be read on ten year old eRoom marketing material. I am also a bit disappointed that nothing new was added.

Some might say that social networking is the new hot stuff which was added to collaboration to generate Enterprise 2.0. I disagree, social networking is nothing new, it is one of success factors for collaboration and has always been part of successful collaboration tools.

Some might say that RSS feeds or Wikis are new technologies that make a collaboration tool so much better that it is worth to be get the Enterprise 2.0 label. For me, RSS feeds or Wikis are just nice features but they do not change the way we collaborate. If you add RSS or Wiki for example to eRoom this would not make a better tool out of it. The features even do not add new use cases, the just provide an easier application integration.

Enterprise 2.0 for me is just old wine in new skins. It is still collaboration as we know it and there is nothing added to that. Enterprises should be careful when considering to replace a the existing collaboration solution with a Enterprise 2.0 solution. The Enterprise 2.0 solution will probably do not better than the collaboration solution. The change of software does not improve anything.

I assume the real new thing about Enterprise 2.0 is that it addresses Enterprises by its name. Enterprise collaboration is also nothing new. If I look back I can see a lot of enterprises that are using eRoom corporate wide and even inter-corporate for collaboration. Enterprises did well with eRoom and they always lose a lot of social and collaboration advantages by their transition to other platforms.
I also have a ambivalent view about Enterprise integration of collaboration. Another success factor for collaboration is flexibility which leads to a creative community. This flexibility, freedom or creativity is what teams make to contribute and this is why collaboration is so valuable for enterprises. However, enterprises usually want control over all creations which eliminates creativity. I have never seen a solution that is able to break this. I don't even think that this is possible by just adding a software or tool. To get into collaboration the enterprises have carry the success factors and adjust policies, culture and processes.

Pending Releases from EMC

2010-02-08T11:41:00.000-08:00

Today I am completely wondering about the Software Release strategy of EMC. They potentially have now two collaborative products but each of them needs urged to be updated.

The situation about eRoom is well known. It has now been 8(!) years that eRoom was bought by Documentum. eRoom V6 was the latest product at this time and eRoom Technology prepared for the release of eRoom 7.
Some of my readers might remember that we had a major Release of eRoom every year and about four minor Release for every major release.

The release of V7 was delayed due to the fact that the documentum connector had to be built into the product. This was the last major enhancement to eRoom and we have not seen any new major release or significant change to the product since then.

The latest official release is 7.4.2 and this release neither supports IE7 or IE8. So the latest supported version of Internet Explorer is V6, this a version that microsoft doesn't want you to use.

I know that there is a patch that brings support for the latest versions of Internet Explorer to eRoom, but this is just a patch and it still seems that eRoom is not very well maintained and a release is immanent.

The situation about CenterStage is different. The product is new to the marked and compared to SharePoint, which is a competitor, EMC has to catch up.
I know that there was recently a service pack, but there it seems that there is almost no marketing from EMC.
There are customers that are asking, sales teams that are trying to sell and partners that are waiting. But there is nothing from EMC, not even a word.
To use CenterStage as an eRoom replacement lots of features are required in CenterStage. To use it as an competition against SharePoint the product needs do evolve.

So it is strange to see that EMC does not provide a new version for at least for one of their collaborative products.

Migrating away from eRoom, Part 1: Loss

2010-01-12T17:43:00.000-08:00

When I look to my customers I see that they still love eRoom. They use eRoom as a flexible tool for almost all collaborative tasks. And it seems that some of will continue their use of eRoom for a long time. Good to see that EMC also has committed to eRoom, there will be support for the next couple of years. I hope that the support will be better than that we have seen the last couple of years.

Other customers also still like eRoom, but they are in the situation the organization is replacing eRoom by other products like CenterStage, Sharepoint, Quickr or other solutions.

Most of them are facing a strange situation: No other product in the marked is and capable to contain all collaborative content from eRoom. There will be always a loss when content is migrated from eRoom. This loss could be loss of information, loss of functionality, loss of flexibility or other losses. For most organizations it is almost impossible to completely replace eRoom with other collaboration platforms within the next couple of years. Even EMC is unable to make CenterStage to a full eRoom replacement within the next couple of years.

One of the most common migration scenarios that is discussed in the moment is to operate eRoom in parallel to new platform that is expected to replace eRoom. I expect that most customers will decide to run the platforms in parallel for about two years. This seems to be also a very clever way to have a smooth transition away from eRoom.

To maintain two collaboration platforms at the same time is very expensive. How comes that customers decide to go that way? To be honest, I do not know but I have some ideas:

1.) Enterprise v/s Collaboration
Collaboration, as we know it from eRoom gives a lot of flexibility to the end user, this is what the user wants and likes. Enterprise wants to control all contents and processes. Even if flexibility was one of the best features of eRoom, other platforms offer a better control to the sake of enterprise needs. I will discuss this in detail in a later post.

2.) Structures
eRoom allows to create almost every type of content element in almost every other type of content element. Endusers user this feature very intensive to organize their work. The drawback of this is that contents in eRoom are hard to find after a couple of time. Newer concepts, as found in SharePoint and CenterStage do not allow to generate all content types on all levels.

3.) Collaborative Metadata
eRoom allows to add discussions, votes or files to almost all elements at all levels. For database entries other elements like traffic signs, approvals or member lists are allowed. This features allow users to generate many small sub contexts within rooms. This sub contexts can be at almost every item and only the users know about them. These contexts are almost impossible to migrate.

I see today no full replacement for eRoom. Migrations are always long projects where someone has to decide that content can be lost during the migration. To minimize the loss It could always be a good idea run the new platform and eRoom in parallel.

A Good Start

2010-01-11T09:51:00.000-08:00

It seems to be strange to start a blog about eRoom just at the time when the successor of eRoom is lurking out of the door.
It is true that eRoom did not get any major updates the last couple of years. Well, the most visible update that came to eRoom when EMC took over Documentum and the eRoom Software was the new logo which now contains the name of the new owner.
It is also true that the successor of CenterStage is now released after years of new product development. But is this a reason not to blog about eRoom?

Yes, the collaboration business has changed during the last years, when eRoom did not get any further evolvement and CenterStage was this new product to bring collaboration into the Web 2.0 age. During this time EMC Documentum did not attend the competition in the collaboration marked. Other products came to the market at this time, products like Sharepoint which have not seen the best market acceptance a couple of years ago. Sharepoint seems to be now the new hot thing.
Other ideas of collaboration have been evolved the last couple of years, Wikis got important, Twitter came to live and google is trying to reinvent collaboration with the Wave.

There are lots of topics which are worth to blog about:

Working with eRoom
Using eRoom Extensions to enhance the possibilities
Archiving eRoom contents
Managing a eRoom installation
Migrating eRoom to other systems
Replacing eRoom with other collaboration solutions
Integration into business processes
Discussing about new collaboration ideas

I do not want to limit this blog to eRoom. But this is what I do most in the moment and this is what I am be able to share.
I expect that other collaborative platt form will find their place on this blog. I expect that the number of posts about Sharepoint will significantly grow over the next months. And, if the folks from EMC will do their work, CenterStage will also find the way to this blog.