Impressed by your optimism which you haven't been quick to leverage. I don't think much has changed when it comes to practicalities. I think the future is very much wait an see. On the other hand, I don't think Documentum ever really lost the short list. They may have had issues closing, but they were still very capable when most of their competition was floundering the same way. Regardless,myou make great points and EMC is very much worth watching in 2012. -Pie

Reading this and you come up with a good thing, storage vs content management. Use cases can't just be about storage, though that is an important use-case. Storing online needs to be like using a drive. Box.net has done that already. Without reading your example, it starts with sharing. I want to share stuff. Not just with friends, but between Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and whatever comes next. I don't see a lot of home uses for retention until I store tax forms online. What I really do with that though, is store data. This is something to think upon. Trying to think of uses in the new world, but it is a challenge. Maybe some Guinness with like minds would go a long way. -Pie

Just re-read this post. Still shocked that you publicly agreed with me on something. Wanted to say that CMIS does support renditions. Very important in general. Also shows that CMIS isn't after the lowest common denominator. Now to read your follow-up post. http://nevertalkwhenyoucannod.typepad.com/nevertalk/2010/10/what-would-you-do-with-commoditized-ecm-the-details.html -Pie

But you forgot to mention....how was the soundtrack??? -Pie

I like the topic. I wrote an article on CMS Wire today (link below) that touches on the topic of a platform. Here are a couple of points that are pretty quick... - Content Management for all businesses. Work and collaborate with other companies even when you are a new startup. - REALLY BIG systems. Want to digitize the files in a large insurance firm or govt agency? Too expensive and they have to keep everything. - High Availability and Disaster Recovery on the cheap. -Pie http://www.cmswire.com/cms/information-management/what-the-past-can-teach-us-about-information-management-agility-008608.php

I think 2 years ago, I just ignored it. I saw the significance of FirstPoint, I recall that, but not being actively engaged in pharma at the time, I didn't really comment. I can't find anywhere that I scoffed at the idea back then, which doesn't mean I didn't. I did say in 6 months later (link below) that the ECM vendors, if they worked WITH SharePoint, were going to need to offer value aside from infrastructure. That said, I was still surprised. I never thought that Documentum couldn't lose to SP in the pharmas. I just always thought they would defend their turf, which should have been easy to do. I figured that Documentum had a bye until SP2010 was out, and that they would fight the good fight. All those years of mailing it in is now blatantly obvious. -Pie http://wordofpie.com/2008/09/02/forecasting-the-future-of-documentum-and-sharepoint/

Look at the question from this angle, what is the alternative... If we change the term, the education process starts all over. Nobody wants that. Has what we are doing changed? I would say no. It is more complicated and broader than it was 10 years ago, but the basic problem is the same... Have content, need control Okay, so there is more to it than that, but while the details evolve, the basic need is still there. We should evolve the definition and discussions, not the term. Until what we do can no longer be rationally covered by the term Enterprise Content Management, we should focus on our definitions and expanding our reach. As for the definition itself, been working on that through a string of posts. The latest, with some interesting comments, is here. http://wordofpie.com/2009/12/28/turning-the-ecm-definition-around/ -Pie

The disposition math is all wrong. He seems to lower the growth rate because there is less content the year before. Last I checked, people are more prone to create content if there is more room out there, not the other way around. Plus, following the trend, if you dispose of 50%, you'll have negative content. Not likely. Okay, to fix it, say you have 1.5TB to start, which is a best guess for where he started to get to 45 TB. At a creation rate of 40% of the content out there, fixing the faulty disposition rate, you'll create 12 TB in the final year. So you can't drop below that. When I worked it out I get the following: 10%: 35 TB 20%: 29 TB 30%: 25 TB All very nice and better than 45%. There are major flaws in that schedule. I would gather that after 5 years, 95-99% of an organizations content can be disposed of. Using his metrics, he only disposes of 65%. There are cliffs in disposition. No content may be disposed of in year 2, but 75% in year 5. The point is that it isn't so dramatic. -Pie

It was a coincidence. I was having drinks with Cheryl McKinnon who was with Open Text (now with Nuxeo). She came from the PC DOCS crowd where I started. After talking for a few hours I was inspired to write my post. That, in turn, inspired 20+ people to do the same, including Johnny and Lee. I'm not worried, yet. If I see higher level defections, then I will worry. -Pie