May 2007

Another archiving option

As I've noted here before, there are a lot of potential uses for the new import/export framework. One of them is archiving.

Let's say that you want to preserve the HR department's shared directory. Backing up the content means a lot more than just copying the files and folders. There's also all the information about the document--document classes, security settings, comments, etc.--that needs to be preserved. How do you store this extra information as part of the backup?

This short research note answers that question.

I like my first life, thanks

Since I've been doing some research on the state of Web 2.0 technology adoption, I spent some time looking at Second Life, There, and other virtual world applications. I've reached one preliminary conclusion:

Either I'm really getting old, or these applications are really goofy.

I've heard people try to position Second Life for business. I know that companies are trying to market their products through these virtual worlds. But are they a collaborative tool, in the same fashion as Wikis, blogs, IM, and the like. Uhhhh, probably not.

If I'm missing something, please tell me.

RM by any other name

When we designed the 6.0 version of Enterprise Document Manager, we took some pains to make its features generally useful. The 5015.2 requirements looked, from a particular angle, like many of the features we already planned. Disposition rules and vital record indicators are, more or less, the ways in which you'd automate the lifecycle of content. Final disposition reflects the formal rules of good content hygiene--get rid of junk you don't need, handle other content with care--that's a general priority in many organizations today.

Therefore, as a product manager, a lot of questions I've been answering lately take the form of, "When would I use the new 6.0 features to...?" That's one reason why I wrote the institutional repository white paper, to describe how you might use the RM and non-RM features in a particular scenario.

I'm writing another white paper, this time covering the options for plugging our technology into an e-portfolio project. Much of the discussion will be the same: when do you use particular features, and how?

It'd be great if there were a single answer. However, not everyone means the same thing by the term, "e-portfolio." Making RM a hidden or subtle part of collaboration is new, so most people need to ponder how "RM by any other name" might help creating, publishing, maintaining, and exporting an e-portfolio.

In a couple of years, maybe, e-portfolios will become more better defined, and RM integrated into collaboration will become more commonplace. Until then, it takes a little extra explanation, or a quick demo, to get to that "Aha!" moment.

E-learning mashups