February 2007

Storage and collaboration in the sky

The rumble that has started between VMWare and Microsoft is no surprise. What might get missed in the David-versus-Goliath tone of the press coverage, however, is the very different vision that Microsoft has from the rest of the market.

The problem isn't just that Microsoft didn't understand virtualization well enough to get a head start on the competition. It's also that Microsoft doesn't see the world in the same, service-oriented way as people who build and use Web 2.0 applications.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Services (MOSS) provides a peek into the Microsoft worldview. In earlier incarnations, SharePoint was a collaboration platform strictly designed for workgroups and departments. It was not designed to be the platform for, say, the document collaboration equivalent of YouTube or Flickr. Collaboration on an enterprise scale was the opposite of what SharePoint's "let a thousand separate sites bloom" philosophy allowed. Internet-scale collaboration wasn't even in the cards.

With the release of MOSS 2007, SharePoint is still a tool designed for organizations that like lots of little, distinct sites. I know that there are departments and virtual teams impatient enough to set up a MOSS site, just to get moving. However, I know almost no IT managers who embrace the notion of an uncountable number of MOSS sites, sprouting up like toadstools after a spring rain. Once MOSS users try collaborating outside a department or virtual team, they too often get disillusioned over Microsoft's Balkanized view of collaboration.

We now live in a world where people expect to be able to share their pictures with anyone on Flickr, chat with anyone via AIM, and post useful information to the world via Wikipedia. Whether or not Microsoft wins this round with VMWare may depend on whether more people in Redmond understand the real value of virtualization as a service. However, that may not change Microsoft's view of what people do with the content stored in the file system, whether the OS is virtualized or not.

Thou shalt comply

Last year, when we were still working on the 6.0 version of the Xythos Enterprise Document Manager, we still had customers and partners who were using us to address compliance requirements. You can check out their success stories here.

However, for the person looking for another tool to help meet compliance requirements, it may not have been 100% clear exactly how someone might use the features in Xythos to address the demands of Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, FERPA, and other regulations. Getting DoD 5015.2 certification is great, to demonstrate that we have a particular set of features. That's not the same as saying how those features apply to other standards.

I wrote this white paper, which could use some updating in light of the 6.0 release, to help clarify these issues. (Warning: This document is very detailed.) I also wrote some shorter, mini-white papers about 21 CFR Part 11, HIPAA, and Basel II (another financial controls standard, much like SarbOx). If you like what you see, let me know--there are other standards we could cover, using the same approach as these three short documents.

Records management for the masses

Several years ago, if you said that many basic document management features like versioning, custom metadata, and workflow should go mainstream, most people treated you as if you'd been sitting out in the sun too long. (There, there. Sit down, take a deep breath, and relax. Put document management back into its comfortable little mental niche. Feel better?)

Now, it's taken for granted that the average person needs more than just file storage. Whether you're more worried about how to collaborate in cross-organizational teams, or how to meet organizational or regulatory standards for document retention, the file server doesn't give you everything you need. ECM tools are overkill, and in any case, they're generally too expensive and difficult to roll out to a mass audience, even if the average person had the time and inclination to learn a complex document management system.

Gartner pioneered the term "basic content services," which is bleeding into the lexicon of the IT industry at large. (I've heard people in IT departments, the press, and--horrors!--even other analyst firms use the term.) Basic content services are, in a nutshell, "document management for the masses"--something that, several years ago, seemed as plausible as a nuclear-powered can opener.

Records management is merely a sub-species of document management. It's suffering from the same problems that infliced DM: it's treated as a niche application that only a few people really can or should use. Unfortunately, the broader organizational imperative behind RM, "Thou shalt handle important content according to the proper guidelines," has to involve a larger group of people who create, secure, update, and dispose of content.

These assumptions shaped our design of Xythos Enterprise Document Manager 6.0, which is an attempt to create "records management for the masses." People know that we can do "document management for the masses," a.k.a. basic content services. Now, we have an official certification from the people behind the DoD 5015.2 standard that we do records management right, and it's embedded in the normal experience of a Xythos user. We haven't made that person's life more complex; in fact, in at least one important way, we've actually made some regular tasks far easier.

If you don't believe me, you're welcome to join us for the March 1 web seminar about the 6.0 release. Feel free to hurl objections at us, if what we've built doesn't cut the mustard, usability-wise or records management-wise.

Shameless self-promotion corner

I recently published this article in Business Integration Journal. It's a good example of why we Xythinians talk so much about "basic content services." Whatever ECM projects might look good on paper, they still have to face IT realities, such as integration requirements. Since you can easily fill up your to-do list with the integration tasks, you're often compelled to scale back your ambitions to something far less ambitious--which, in the long run, might serve your users' needs better.

Sponsored research support with Xythos technology

At the user group meeting, we showed the latest release of Xythos Enterprise Document Manager 6.0 as a tool for sponsored research. There are a lot of tasks before applying for a grant, and after receiving grant money, where the tools we provide can make life easier for principal investigators and the people who support them. We recorded these demos, which are available at the following links:

• Part I: Pre-grant support
• Part II: Post-grant support

The demos include everything from basic collaboration ("Hey, is this a good idea for a research project?") to tougher records management-like situations ("How long does the National Science Foundation require me to keep these documents?").

The files are large (in the 50-70 MB range), so apologies for the large download. Once I get more proficient with the video capture tool I'm using, I'll squeeze these files down to smaller sizes. All feedback is welcome--just click my name at the bottom of this post to send me an e-mail.

User group meetings

We just finished the Xythos user group meetings in San Francisco, Milwaukee, Boston, and Washington, DC. We heard from our customers what they're doing, and plan to do, with our products. We also shared our ideas for upcoming releases and received valuable feedback on future directions.

Speaking of feedback, we have a new e-mail ID, feedback@xythos.com, for sending us your comments about our products. By all means, send us your ideas about where we might go with our technology.

Thanks to everyone who attended the user group meetings. We hope it was a useful session for all of you.

Starting again

I haven't written an entry in this blog in a long, long time. So long, in fact, I'm just going to start from scratch. When we launched the developer.xythos.com web site, we wanted the blogs to be a way for our customers and partners to see what people at Xythos were doing. In addition, our occasional bloviations about the marketplace explain how we view our corporate mission, and better put our current efforts into better context.

Since our last postings in these blogs, we've shipped new versions of the server products (Enterprise Document Manager, Digital Locker, and WebFile Server) and the Xythos Drive. We've launched a software-as-a-service offering, Xythos On Demand. We've created new options for people who want to turn paper into electronic content, and then store and manage it in a system like ours.

And that's just what we've been doing on the product front. We have more success stories, professional services offerings, ways to engage technical support--the list goes on and on. Therefore, rather than try to create a thread of continuity that stretches months into the past, I'm starting this blog over.

[If you want to see the old postings, click here.]