It’s a bit new, so you won’t see it just yet. But ultimately it will be a service delivered by EMC only.

Watch this space anywho..    more on the way.

Transvault also offer mail archive migration services for a number of other Mail Archive products. So if you have an archive solution and you don’t like it..   don’t just lump it,  there are ways and means..

Remember, just notes now, later I’ll analyze after I have follow-up discussions.

• Mentioned the reason Documentum was founded was in order to help cure cancer.
  • Reference count: II
• Purpose of IIG: Maximum leverage from your Information to give a distinct business advantage.
• Information at the “heart” of what people do.
  • Lots of it (35ZB)
  • mostly Unstructured (95%)
  • Mostly unmanaged (85%), but about 85% of it should be unmanaged.
  • More regulations around managing this Information
  • By 2020, 33% of it will either live or pass-through the “cloud”
• Information with People and the Right Process: Information Intelligence Group
  • Content Management and Archiving still at foundation, but doesn’t define the Group
  • Five Product Families
  • Name is a symbol of change to-date, not just future
• 1: Intelligent Information Governance (SourceOne umbrella)
  • Archiving
  • Compliance/Records Management
  • Search and eDiscovery
  • Announcing SourceOne for MS SharePoint, works for 2010 and coming later in Q2
• 2: Intelligent Case Management (xCP): New home for the Documentum platform
• 3: Intelligent Information Access
  • Access Your Way: Desktop, Offline, Explorer, Outlook, SharePoint, CenterStage
  • MyDocumentum and CenterStage
• 4: Intelligent Enterprise Capture (Captiva)
• 5: Intelligent Customer Communications (Document Sciences)
  • Web Experience Management (FatWire) fits here as well
• Partnership with SAP. (details to be announced next week at SAP Conference, SAPPHIRE)
  • Solutions this quarter
• Strategic Alliance & Partnership with Informatica announcement coming later this week.
  • Address the 5% of structured information
• Long-term vision is to move things to the cloud.
  • Private Cloud: Search is getting “fixed” for VMs by Q3.
  • Going to build xCP and other things in public cloud for future use, will make config/customizations move readily from data center to private cloud to public cloud.

Going to the Architecture session next, though not sure I can focus.  Lots to digest and think about.

Disclaimer

All information in this post was gathered from the presenters and presentation. It does not reflect my opinion unless clearly indicated (Italics in parenthesis). Any errors are most likely from my misunderstanding a statement or imperfectly recording the information. Updates to correct information are reflected in red, but will not be otherwise indicated.

All statements about the future of EMC products and strategy are subject to change at any time due to a large variety of factors.

I’ve been with EMC for 22 years, and as I travel around the country meeting with partners and customers, I find that customers are asking their trusted partner advisors some straightforward questions about information governance. Customers are asking: “can you help us determine what information is stored, where is it stored, who gets access, how is it searched and retrieved, how long do we keep it and how do we preserve it?”

With these questions in mind, EMC and its channel partners are working in sync to meet the demand for Information Governance solutions and helping organizations manage risk, simplify eDiscovery and cut costs.

As a result, over the past 12 months, our partners have deployed EMC SourceOne into many organizations.

All the deployments demonstrate SourceOne’s flexibility and ease of use. For example, one of our global systems integrators won separate contracts with a midwestern state and a state public safety agency to archive their respective e-mails with EMC SourceOne Email Management.

A global EMC reseller deployed SourceOne Email Management into a credit card issuing company to help it consolidate six disparate servers to one centralized platform. The customer’s previous system was unable to support its network of users. From day one, SourceOne was able to support 40,000 of the credit card company’s users, with room to grow.

All the deployments enable users to search and access static data using any device. In other words, e-mails that end users thought were deleted can now be found as easily as typing a search function on a BlackBerry.

Our partners have also deployed SourceOne eDiscovery – Kazeon into many organizations. The solution provides customers with the ability to respond effectively to eDiscovery over time, with a combination of eDiscovery tools as well as proper information management for litigation readiness.

I’ll leave you with a final thought. Can you possibly think of any better way to understand your customers, than to implement the solution yourself, in-house? That’s exactly what one of EMC’s channel partners did.

International Computerware, Inc (ICI) is a successful EMC SourceOne partner and customer.  After it deployed EMC SourceOne Email Management, ICI reduced e-mail server storage by 50%, improved performance on the production e-mail server by 87%, and increased the overall productivity of its mobile workforce by enabling anytime, anywhere access to emails.  Not only that, but now they have  greater security and central manageability of emails for compliance and litigation purposes.

Hear it for yourself  (see video). Listen to Jamie Shepard, Executive Vice President, Technology Solutions at ICI, talk about EMC’s commitment to the channel, the benefits of being an EMC SourceOne customer and why ICI’s customers are looking for information governance solutions.

I’d like to thank our partners worldwide for helping to make EMC SourceOne’s first year so successful.

/Ken Grohe

What city would be complete without a power grid? How often have you really thought about a power station? In developed countries, power is largely taken for granted. Our lights are on. Our food and drinks are cold. Our homes are warm. Our computers, televisions, and other electronic gadgets are working. It’s not until there is a power outage that we realize how much we rely on our utilities. The “Power Station” was a necessary district in the design of SourceOne City. We needed a utility grid to keep the lights on in SourceOne City. And similarly to a real city, the Power Station is going to be largely invisible yet incredibly strategic. It provides the supporting infrastructure for Information Governance. The Power Station is state-of-the-art. It is highly available and easily scalable. As SourceOne City grows, the Power Station is designed with enough headroom to support the increased volume. This means that you can support Information Governance as your needs expand – whether organic growth of your organization, growth through mergers and acquisitions, and/or the need to support additional content, policies or processes.

Just like a real city, the Power Station can deliver power to buildings of all sizes – large office buildings and small houses. Similarly EMC SourceOne can deliver Information Governance to organizations of all sizes, delivering benefits to cost effectively manage your information whether you are a mid-size company or a large global enterprise. Changing times require a flexible infrastructure. The Power Station in SourceOne City is designed with an eye towards the future. Applying the metaphor to your Information Governance needs means there are constant changes in your IT environment. New versions of applications emerge that provide increased enhancements and better usability. You want an Information Governance solution that can help you to easily manage your information so that upgrades and migrations are simple. You also want a solution that gives you intelligence about your information – visibility into the information that you need to manage. Finally, when we think about how we purchase power, the Power Station is a good analogy to a utility-based model. Not sure you want to own Information Governance in-house? No problem. We are working with partners who can deliver Information Governance as a service to you. While the current phrase for this model is “cloud computing”, there aren’t any clouds in SourceOne City – it’s all beautiful sunny blue skies every day.

Did you have a New Year’s Resolution to get in shape? Maybe you had a goal of losing 5,10 or even 20 lbs. To get stronger, or faster or make that special outfit fit like it used to? Every year I know I make a mental note that this year I am going to “do it”. Some years I am successful, some years I am not, I suspect you might be like me. What is the secret to staying or getting fit? Experts will tell you it is consistency. It’s about making those small but critical changes- cutting down on your portions, eating the right things and exercising on a regular, consistent basis.

Today’s column is being written from the SourceOne Health and Fitness Center. Much like your body, you want to keep your messaging environment, whether it’s Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes, lean, trim and efficient- a muscle building, heart pumping machine. But what is your messaging environment like today? Is it like “last year’s” body? Maybe its weighted down with unmanaged duplicate messages and heavy attachments, all sitting on expensive primary storage feeling like an expensive outfit that you spent your hard earned money on, but now have to squeeze into to make fit.

Just as there are health consequences for being overweight, there are consequences from having an unmanaged, bloated messaging system. For example, there are escalating storage costs for production storage related to email. There are increased administrative costs for maintaining the messaging environment.  Effective data protection/disaster recovery for email as a mission-critical application is another challenge/cost as mailbox sizes expand. Somebody pass the Pepto Bismol!

Have you ever seen those exercise infomercials? They are usually on after you had that late night snack and are feeling guilty  These are quick fixes that promise to help you lose 30 lbs in 30 days, or  promise to shape a particular body part with some piece of exercise equipment that you end up hanging your clothes on, or promote some special but extreme diet that results in extraordinary results.  Just like those infomercials, we can take draconian measures to solving our messaging glut- such as putting in mailbox quotas and forcing end users to manage.PST and NSF files with their own retention rules. This may work in the short term but it only leads to more problems, such as creating more risk, specifically, preventing organizations from being prepared for events like eDiscovery.

So what’s the answer?  Here in the SourceOne Health and Fitness Center, we have found that content archiving for email, can lower IT administrative and operational costs by 60% or more, improve application performance, cut backup windows by more than half and improve overall user productivity.  EMC SourceOne helps customers to proactively manage information growth, applying retention and disposition policies according to business policies for compliance purposes or litigation readiness.  Leveraging a tiered infrastructure results in a more optimized and lean production environment.  Skeptical?  Why not get an e-mail health check by using our interactive EMC SourceOne  Email Benefits Calculator here- https://roianalyst.alinean.com/emc/AutoLogin.do?d=434247315899769601

And see for yourself. Unlike those infomercials, you don’t have to “call and use your credit card now!”

I hope we will see you at EMC World this year in Boston May 10-13. If you’re there, be sure to attend a special breakfast we will be having on Tuesday, May 11. It will be a special EMC SourceOne & EMC Archive Platforms Sponsored Breakfast with unique fitness personalities you won’t see anywhere else.  Come and see for yourself!

Stay pumped,

Garth Landers

This video is courtesy of a couple of outstanding EMC business partners in South Africa who are building expertise around EMC SourceOne.  To learn more, visit: http://www.emc.com/SourceOneCity

Last week we explored the Legal District of SourceOne City.  This week, we’ll look at the Governance HQ.  The Governance HQ explores all the issues around gaining full control and oversight of your information, including compliance, e-disclosure, and policy-based retention.

Many organizations have policies to manage portions of their data or data related to particular applications.  Financial data or customer records are generally managed to some degree within an organization.  Records Managers will tell us that their organizations are still growing their physical records and paper-based storage.  At the same time, they are also struggling with a growing wave of information assets they need to manage that are being produced by new types of applications. With all this growth, managing the total body of information assets is becoming more challenging than ever.

In addition to information growth, there is a challenge in the evolving need to govern that information.  Whether it is industry regulation, corporate best practices, or audits and investigations, organizations need to be able to prove that they know what information they have, where it is, who has access to it, and where it is in its lifecycle.  They also may need to demonstrate that they have disposed of all information that should no longer be maintained.  They may also need to present a portion of that information and prove the chain of custody.  As a result, organizations want to be able to manage information centrally, consistently, and at the same time in ways that minimally affect the work habits of employees.

How much control organizations have over information is piecemeal.  According to research conducted by AIIM, more than 85% of organizations have rules around how they manage email content.  At the other end of the spectrum, when it comes to new social media applications, such as wikis, blogs, or information kept on business-oriented social networks, fewer than 30% of organizations have even thought about creating rules let alone applying those rules to the content they already have. In addition to that most organizations are still struggling with unstructured content they have in various repositories around the organization, from SharePoint, to file shares.

Managing the lifecycle of content, from content creation through archiving and finally to disposition is a complex issue that requires input from IT, business content owners and the legal team.

Our Information Governance solutions – including both the SourceOne family as well as the Documentum Records Management solutions are designed to help customers take the policies they develop and be able to apply them in ways that lay the foundations of information governance and implement policies in an integrated manner, and in ways that manage the content with minimal or no change to existing end user behavior.

Following the introduction last week of the SourceOne Tower, this week we visit the Legal District.  The objective of the Legal District is to provide guidance on evolving trends and 3^rd party views on managing eDiscovery challenges.  We also provide insight into the technology to help create a repeatable proactive approach to eDiscovery – lowering your cost and risk.

While the Legal District would seem a logical destination for legal staff, the objective is to help bridge communications between legal, IT, and compliance.  Ironically, the most common challenge for a corporation isn’t an esoteric legal precedent or complex defense strategy. It is effective communications between the legal and IT teams.  Even though both teams speak the same language, the legal and IT lexicon is so drastically different they might as well be from different planets. Cross-functional teams must mind the gap and bridge the communication challenges to effectively defend the corporation during a litigation proceeding.

The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) dictate the legal standards and rules that apply to the process for preparing and producing electronically stored information (ESI), as well as for resolving related disputes in the United States.  As we will see, FRCP encompasses both legal obligations, as well as technical obligations of both parties. For IT professionals, these are the tenets, which bind your legal team:

FRCP 16: The courts expect companies to be ready for litigation.  This includes having fluent knowledge of the IT infrastructure, content repositories and network architecture, so that the pretrial conference leads to consensus on what ESI is discoverable.

As FRCP 16 spells out, legal and IT are on the hook to deliver ESI, as well as discuss limitations and capabilities of a corporation’s IT operations. Recently, Judges Maas and Peck conducted a session at LegalTech in NY called “Ten eDiscovery Commandments” which the first commandment was “Thou shalt exhibit competence and avoid pleading technological ignorance.”

FRCP 26: Provides protection from excessive or expensive e-discovery requests, except when you don’t deserve that protection.

FRCP 26 provides protection from overly burdensome discovery requests.  However, this has been the go-to rule for defendants to attempt to sidestep eDiscovery and judges are becoming more stringent in its application.

FRCP 26(a)(1)(C): Requires that corporations make initial disclosures no later than 14 days after the Rule 26(f) meet and confer, unless an objection or another time is set by stipulation or court order. If you have an objection, now is the time to voice it.

Rule 26(b)(2)(B): Introduced the concept of not reasonably accessible ESI. The concept of not reasonably accessible paper had not existed. This rule provides procedures for shifting the cost of accessing not reasonably accessible ESI to the requesting party.  It is often referred to as the “Backup Tape Recovery” problem, which was covered in Zubuake v. USB Warberg opinion.  California’s Civil Discovery Act passed and became a bill, which effectively overturned the Zubulake ruling making all disaster recovery ESI discoverable.  It is IT’s worse nightmare.

FRCP 26(b)(5)(B): Gives courts a clear procedure for settling claims when you hand over ESI to the requesting party that you shouldn’t have.

This rule provides that if information is produced in discovery that is later subject to a claim of privilege or protection as trial preparation material, the party who received this information must promptly return, sequester or destroy the specified information as well as any copies it has and must not use or disclose this information until the claim is resolved (“clawback” provision). In order to expedite a determination of the claim, the receiving party may promptly present the information to the court under seal. If the receiving party had disclosed the information prior to being notified of the claim, it must take reasonable steps to retrieve it.

Rule 26(f): This is the meet and confer rule. This rule requires all parties to meet within 99 days of the lawsuit’s filing and at least 21 days before a scheduled conference.

Rule 26(f) causes the most anxiety during litigation. It sets the timeline eDiscovery, which each party must follow.  Without prior eDiscovery capability and policies deployed, the corporation must solve both the eDiscovery legal and technology challenges at the same time.

Rule 26(g): Requires an attorney to sign every e-discovery request, response, or objection.  This rule basically puts a corporation’s legal counsel in a position where they are held directly responsible for…… everything.

FRCP 37: Judges have the power, courtesy of Rule 37(f), to impose sanctions against a party “who fails to obey an order to provide or permit discovery.”

Recently in Magaña v. Hyundai, the trial court found that Hyundai had willfully violated the discovery rules, its discovery abuses had substantially prejudiced Magaña in preparing for trial and it had spoiled and lost evidence. The judge awarded Jesse Magaña $8 million dollar default judgment against Hyundai as discovery sanction.

Rule 37(e): Creates a safe harbor from sanctions if you did not preserve, and therefore no longer have, ESI that’s requested provided that certain conditions and circumstances are met. Judges also have powers that are considered inherent in the court that expand the ability to impose sanctions beyond Rule 37.

These are the main rules, which are top of mind for your legal team.  Understanding the IT implications of FRCP is critical for IT professional to mind the gap and have constructive discussions with their legal team.    Everyone can meet in SourceOne City – the Legal District is a means to help you bridge the gap in communication that may exist in your organization.

Want to learn more?  Visit the Legal District of SourceOne City.

With the context that Andy and Jeff provided last week, it is my pleasure to write to you from the metaphorical SourceOne Tower.

Before we look at the significance of SourceOne Tower, I’d like to take an opportunity to introduce myself.  I am the newest member of the SourceOne team, joining in September 2009 as Director of SourceOne marketing.   Over the past couple of decades I’ve worked in several different capacities including product management, product marketing and business development for companies that offered solutions in the areas of archiving, compliance and eDiscovery.   I’ve worked for everything from start-ups to well established global companies.

The opportunity at EMC, and specifically to work in the SourceOne business unit, was interesting to me because it brings together all of the discrete solution areas that I’ve worked on in the past – archiving, compliance and eDiscovery.  My years in the market and interactions with customer, analysts and other thought leaders have made it obvious that siloed approaches to information management are not good enough to keep up with today’s incredibly fast pace of electronic information creation and dissemination.  So it is my pleasure to lead the EMC SourceOne opportunity across a strong team of talented individuals from around the world.

Now you know who I am, let’s talk about SourceOne Tower.  I debated the title of my blog – “A View from the Tower.”   On first pass, the title could imply an “ivory tower” – a place that is removed from reality and isolated from day-to-day challenges.  But to the contrary, I think it is fitting that the heart of SourceOne City is a tower.  SourceOne Tower is a place that ties together all of the different districts of SourceOne City.  It is the focal point for Information Governance to tie together all of the various starting points that are represented in the various districts.  And it is the highest point in the city, which means that it provides unobstructed vista across SourceOne City.   I think all of us could benefit from an unobstructed “big picture” view of the challenges our organizations face.

Today’s rate of business, with pressures to find ways to become more innovative while remaining  efficient and competitive makes it difficult to take a larger view of the challenges facing our businesses.  Information management is an excellent example where a tactical solution driven by the IT department may in fact make the compliance officer’s job more difficult to enforce consistent retention policies.  In turn, if retention policies aren’t properly enforced, then the legal department may collect information as part of an eDiscovery that should have been expired out of the environment.   Taking a view of information management from SourceOne Tower, we can see across the districts – all of the stakeholders who in fact have a vested interest in information management.   So we invite you to use SourceOne Tower as a way to bring together your different departments to have an unobstructed view of how to think holistically about information management.

The other thing that SourceOne Tower gives us is an observation deck, which gives a clear view to the horizon in all directions.   The SourceOne City charter in 2010 is to give you a starting point with Information Governance.  EMC has a compelling portfolio of products to support this strategy today.  But a view to the future will allow us to take the journey with you on what’s next.

With an unobstructed view, the present and future are clear.

What to expect in SourceOne City

Welcome to the EMC SourceOne Insider – your one source for news from inside SourceOne City. We’ll bring you insider views on the latest trends to manage your information, along with breaking news on Information Governance. You’ll also hear from our experts who will guide you with best practices on how to approach your most pressing information management challenges.

Over the next couple of months, we’ll take the time to introduce SourceOne City to you. Our executives, Jeff Bettencourt, Vice President and General Manager for SourceOne, and Andy Cohen, Vice President and General Manager for Information Governance, will unveil the city, its charter and how we designed SourceOne City to be a new way to think about Information Governance.

News from the districts

From there we will take you on tour, reporting each week on activities and news from the different “districts” within SourceOne City. Gabriela Garner, Director of Product Marketing for SourceOne, will give you the birds-eye view from the SourceOne Tower looking from the perspective of the highest peak in the city. Joyce Tompsett, Principal Product Marketing Manager, will report on the latest in compliance from Governance HQ while David Morris, Senior Marketing Manager, will bring you the top trends from the Legal District.

Thinking about a diet for your Exchange or SharePoint environments? Jill Hearn, Principal Product Marketing Manager, will do an overview of what the Health and Fitness Center has to offer. And what about the end user view of Information Governance? Lori McKellar, Senior Product Marketing Manager, will provide a spotlight into the Technology Park innovations that make Information Governance easy and painless to end users.

Smoothing migrations

No city is complete without a utility grid. SourceOne City has much to offer in the way of underlying infrastructure as well as tools to help you make Exchange and SharePoint migrations smoother.  I’ll come back with the latest view on this.

Scattered through the tour of the city we will post additional news and feature items to give you a complete view into the next generation of Information Governance.  Delivered only by EMC.  Today.

While the EMC SourceOne Insider will continue to be your reference for the latest Information Governance news, the tour will conclude in April with a VIP launch party inside SourceOne City.  Hosted by our own Dave Martin, Principal Product Marketing Manager, it will be a party you won’t want to miss.

Everyone liked the architecture, the GUI and the principles as to how policies and activities are defined; but one big gap it appeared was missing..  Direct Centera integration. Bearing in mind that SourceOne was being positioned not just as Archive for the sake of Archive, but also to meet compliance needs, it seemed something of an oversight that there was no direct integration with EMC’s Compliance Archive Storage Platform (Centera). To make SourceOne talk to Centera you had to use EMC Disk Xtender as an intermediary. Commercially this raised an issue..   were EMC going to make customers pay for Disk Xtender licences and the associated maintenance when it was only to be used as a gapfill until SourceOne could talk to Centera Directly ? luckily.. they were able to facilitate a cost effective solution by way of discounting deals accordingly in most cases.

There were mumbles and hearsay as to when the functionality might arrive…   mumbles which would be revised month on month as  unofficial release dates were pushed back. Now mumbles have converted to official releases with release notes to boot ! the functionality has finally arrived ! This makes it a lot easier to technically position SourceOne in a compliance driven opportunity with Centera..     Watch this space,  lets see if they can now bring file archive under the SourceOne umbrella..

Ideally, we should have access to this information from the beginning, so that we (as EMC partner) could better understand what a SourceOne engagement looks like, what processes are defined, who is responsible for which parts (pre-sales, demo’s, sizing the system, project completion sign-off etc), what time it typically takes to check all the boxes required by EMC, etc.  As early adopters of the product, we are often the most punished because we both get on-board early and show our devotion to EMC and their products, and because we are on the bleeding edge of the technology, we have to weather the bumps and bruises of a road yet to be hoed.  This is not uncommon and is to be expected somewhat in the beginning of working with any fledgling product.

With SourceOne, there is virtually no difference in the amount of effort involved in a system of 100 mailboxes or 5000 mailboxes.  It is basically the same system requireing all the same pre-sales efforts and tasks along with more or less the same efforts and tasks involved in implementing the system.  Because EMC has built out all of the processes that exist in a SourceOne implementation, they have basically built themselves a very thick wall of protection to make sure that customers don’t complain about things like poor performance, a lack of functionality, no documentation on their system etc etc.  Because we have to jump through the hoops defined by EMC the same way for each and every system large or small, they are protected and the systems do typically perform as designed.  This is not a bad thing at all, however, when it comes to the company that performs the work, it eats up all of the profits in a “pre-sales” routine before we even set foot in the door.  Many of us “early adopters” have found this out the hard way.  We have had to create our own internal processes for dealing with all of the work that goes into selling and prepping for installation so that the Systems Engineer that installs it doesn’t get bogged down in paperwork and true sales side tasks so that we can continue to bill on our other projects.  This new class from EMC just may help to address these issues and reduce the overhead involved in getting ready to actually install SourceOne post sale.

The class is broken out as follows:

Course Description:

The course provides training for implementors of EMC SourceOne Email Management. It is designed to present some guidelines to follow and to identify resources available to achieve smooth and consistent installations and deployments on customer sites.

Target audience for this course includes SourceOne solution partners, professional services, and email administrators.

Prerequisites:

- Working knowledge of the EMC SourceOne Email Management product
- Intermediate to advanced consulting experience
- Understanding of the “Engagement Lifecycle”

Objectives:

- Describe what is expected when the sales team “hands over” a booked SourceOne engagement
- Describe what needs to be accomplished to prepare for the engagement
- Develop a SourceOne Solution Design Documentum
- Define all the documentation that is needed to initiate, execute, and close an engagement
- Coordinate all the separate pieces in order to deliver a high quality, well-documented, and successful SourceOne engagement

Outline:

Pre-engagement Documents
- Review documentation that will be handed over from sales
- Use each of these documents to help your engagement
- Assess the customer environment and customer expectations

Pre-engagement Questionnaire
- Review and explain pre-engagement questionnaire
- Use created template document to gather pre-engagement info

Pre-implementation Task List
- Review and explain the pre-implementation task list for Exchange 2003
- Review and explain the pre-implementation task list for Exchange 2007
- Review and explain the pre-implementation task list for Lotus Domino

SourceOne Implementation Design
- Describe the components needed to assemble a SourceOne Email Management design document
- Define which portion of the document creation process need special attention

SourceOne Email Management Installation
- Describe best practices for installing SourceOne
- Describe how SourceOne utilizes DiskXtender

Test and Performance (TAP)
- Describe what is needed prior to starting the TAP
- Discuss tests included in the Test and Performance (TAP) document
- Outline post-TAP procedures
- Define ways to keep the TAP flowing smoothly

Knowledge Transfer
- Define basic SourceOne terminology and concepts
- Explain the flow of mail through the system
- Administer SourceOne through the MMC console
- Monitor SourceOne servers
- Describe SourceOne backups
- Describe SourceOne anti-virus exclusions

Executing the Engagement
- Describe what makes a successful engagement
- Describe how the pieces fit together
- Describe how to start, implement, and close an engagement

Hopefully this class will help to ease the implementation of SourceOne for your company.  While it does not reduce the tasks required to get from pre-sales, to implementation, to project completion, it will give you a better understanding of what is truly under the covers of a SourceOne implementation, how much effort is involved, how needs to be involved, and how you and your clients can both be succesful.

Here is a link to the EMC MyLearn site where the class is offered:

http://mylearn.emc.com/portals/home/ml.cfm?actionID=38&courseID=33343

Stay tuned here for more SourceOne product updates to come.

Scott Johnson, SourceOne Certified

Beach Street Consulting

Download here

I am not a gambler, so I would not necessarily place a wager on my predictions, but here are my predictions for 2010:

1) Software revenue for ECM products will be at least 20% higher than 2009.  A lot customers interested in ECM implementation held off buying anything due to the state of the economy.  Some folks believe that we have already bottomed out and that recovery is happening but a slow pace.  It is this belief that we have bottomed out that is allowing customers to move forward with investments into technology that will help them grow while cutting costs at the same time.  This investment would be much harder to justify if we did not believe that we have bottomed out and that revenue will not continue to drop.  Empirically, we here at Beach Street have seen significant increases in the number and size of RFPs that have come out within the past couple of months.  Even winning a few of things will require us to hire more consultants.  If you are experienced Documentum/Captiva consultant and are interested in joining a company that is passionate about EMC technology, send your resume to us.

2) xCP (aka Documentum) will become the mainstay for CMA.  Webtop will still be supported for some time to come, given that most of the UI features have not been ported to xCP (e.g. apply retention).  CenterStage will continue to be sold to customer whose only need is to collaborate.  However, if you assume that companies are going to invest in automating their business processes and improving employee efficiency, xCP is the only product in EMC that can support this within a short deployment cycle.  SourceOne and Kazeon sales will probably double or triple what they were last year, but both of these products solve very specific problems and do not really integrate directly with CMA product line.  To this point, there is not even a SDK available to support customizing these products.

3) CEVAs (Content Enabled Vertical Applications) will be the focus for new customers.  Some folks would say that CCAs (Content Composite Applications) are the new thing and that customers want to be able to combine content and feature from various apps.  My opinion, which I can back based on the majority of sales calls that I have been on, is that new customers want a vendor that provides a solution that addresses their particular problems (verticals) while providing an architecture/framework that will allow the growth and addition of other solutions.  The existing EMC CMA products are not solutions in my opinion, but xCP allows partners to build solutions rapidly to address specific needs in a vertical.  I believe the “plumbing” of supporting composite apps exists in the fundamental design of Documentum as well as the building blocks that DFS and CMIS provide to support integration of apps into these vertical solutions.

One final note, I am delighted that my company as well as all of our consultants have committed to start sharing our technical knowledge and experience through Beach Street Blog.  While my personal blog, Ask Johnny! – Documentum Guru, will still focus on architecture discussions, this blog will strive to provide information on multitude of products as well from people at various technical skill levels.  I’m looking forward to the year of the Tiger and looking forward to a GRAND year for Beach Street.

Sincerely,

Johnny Gee

Chief Technology Officer

First, lets look at why we archive; mails or otherwise. There are a number of reasons people might decide to archive their mails or file data, the first benefit of doing this would be this archiving static data or mails, while removing them from production storage, minimises the amount of data a company has to backup, minimises spending requirements on fast spinny disk and gives the administrator some control over the ever increasing storage requirements of production servers. That is all great, brilliant, but why else ?

Increasingly, companies are being pushed to be compliant with certain regulatory bodies such as FSA, SEC, etc. These regulatory bodies will state that companies dealing with certain types of data must retain data for a specified period of time; not only that, they must also delete certain types of data after a specified period of time and they must be able to produce certain records/files/mails upon request within a reasonable timeframe in litigation cases, etc.

To take one example, goverment bodies in the UK are bound to being able to produce all mails referencing the requestee’s name upon request (for a fee obviously). This put pressure on organisations to put the mechanisms in place to make these processes as automated and intuitive as possible.

EMC Propose one such solution, SourceOne. SourceOne is still in its infancy as far as the market is concerned, but has been through a signinficant amount of development and is very much a priority product for EMC.

At the moment it only offers mail archive for Exchange and Domino environments, but is set to become a family of products which will incorporate file archive, sharepoint archive and be able to access third party historic archives for the purposes of co-existence.

Architecture 

SourceOne architecture allows you to have any number of roles, spread across any number of servers.. which is nice.

SourceOne uses the concept of worker servers. There are 3 types of worker roles (journaling may be a seperate worker role or may come under Archive, memory fails me at this point):

• —Archive
• —Index
• —Search/Retrieval

Within each of these worker roles are a series of activities that can be performed (Ie, within the Archive role there are activities such as historical archive, PST ingestion, shortcutting,etc..). Depending on the environment you can have all these roles existing on one server, or any number of activities across any number of server. You might decide to have one server just journaling, 2 or 3 servers for indexing, search and retrieval and a machine dedicated to PST ingestion; its very flexible.

New Jobs are created and stored in the activity database, which each of the workers will poll, looking for jobs they can take which match their assigned roles by way of activities.

Setting it up is pretty easy also, the customer would need the following installed :

• Mail services (Exchange/Domino)
• IIS Services
• ASP.NET Version 2
• SQL server 2005

You install a binary which goes and creates the necessary SQL databases, set DB read/write priviledges to the databases from any servers which will be accessing them and then simply point and click install the binaries for the required worker roles on their respective servers, referencing the Databases as you go…  pretty straight forward.

The GUI is pretty intuitive and all the intelligence comes in the policies you set, as with anything.

You first set your archive folders (the physical UNC paths where your archives will reside), and then you create mapped folders which point to your physical archives. It is within the mapped folder where you set the retention and user priviledges.

We create a policy, which will contain its respective activities. Lets run through an example:

We have a Source One Archive folder pointing to .. //example/archive

We create 2 mapped folders :

 Employee Archive & Complaince

Our employee archive folder has a 3 year retention and our compliance folder has a 7 year retention. Now to our policy. We create a policy called mailserver1 archive.. done.

Here is when it gets a little more complicated, but not too much. We create our activties.

When we create an activity, we must reference a mapped folder (this determines, the retention period of mails being archived as per this activity). We also need to reference where we are going to find the mails relating to this activity; we can do this by specifying users/groups in AD or address book, LDAP query or simply message store.

So we create an activity to run a historical archive job at the end of each day and we point to the mapped folder “employee archive” , we want to archive all our employee mail, so we simply point to the associated mail server and select the appropriate message store. Now thats all well and good,  by there are some employees which deal with particularly sensitive data which must be kept in accordance with.. let say FSA regulations. So we create a rule, we can specify that any users within the active directory group “legal team”, with the words “BUY, SELL or aquisition” in the subject or body, must be stored in the Mapped folder “Complaince” which has a 7 year retention set.

When then create a new activity within the same policy to delete and shortcut message from the users mailbox..   wahey! job done!

You can use standard disk for the archive folders, or that company that needs something more solid by way of compliance, they can archive to Centera or they can use Documentum  as the archive repository and utilise all the goodies around eDiscovery (anotehr conversation completely).

..and if you’re an existing Email Xtender customer..  fear not, SourceOne will “Co-Exist” with your existing EX archives. Meaning you can still access them in read only mode for the purposes or search and retrieval, but new mails will be archive to a SourceOne Archive.

Anyway, I could write another 10 paragraphs on the ins and outs, but fior your sanity and mine.. I shal refrain.

The Missing Vision

This was a problem last year, but when you went to a lot of sessions, you started to get a feel for where things were headed.  This year, no such luck.  Every presentation went very vague when talking about dates and features after 2009.  D7 was pushed out to 2010 and everyone tossed in a few extra qualifiers when talking about the future.

One comment I heard was that customers had pushed-back on the rapid version releases and low service pack count.  D6 only had one service pack before D6.5 was released. I concur with that feedback to some extent as I won’t let my clients deploy until that first service pack hits, and I know practioners that prefer to wait until the second service pack.  D6.5 felt more like a service pack than a major release from a functionality/architecture stability standpoint.  Yes, they added High-Volume Server, but that could easily just been labeled sp2.

Of course lots of releases also means lots of certifications to be renewed with each new release of the product. That is no small matter.

It felt bigger than that.  It was as if the Documentum ocean liner was changing course and they weren’t sure of their final direction. Rather than guess, they told you about the great shuffleboard tournament on the Aloha deck. I hate shuffleboard.

Marks’s focus was Return on Information.  It was a five-prong approach focusing on Compliance, Composition (Configure not Code), Customer-Centric Applications, Collaboration, and Cloud Computing. You can refer to my notes or to my article, Field Notes: EMC World 2009 in Summary, that I wrote for CMS Wire for more details. The point was getting return on your investment/information today, not what you can do in a year.  It was a shuffleboard tourney.

There was ONE nugget of future information in the presentation, and that was the Master Content Management item on slide 26. It is in the part where Mark is talking about Virtual Information Management. It sounded a little like Skynet to me and was just mentioned, not elaborated upon. Sounds like EMC wants to rule all the content, even if it doesn’t control all of it in Documentum.  That might have been a vision, but it was just three words.

Candy and Aspirin

I was talking to Cheryl McKinnon of Open Text about a month ago.  She was telling me about their Enterprise 2.0 strategy that is marketed under the name Bloom.  It is a good concept, nothing super innovative yet as the key components aren’t due for release for another month, but it was a refreshing message to hear from an ECM vendor.

The key concept we discussed was Candy and Aspirin.  Her colleague, Bill Forquer, described it best as, that balance of the attractive things that people want, with the necessary risk reducers that they need.

Cheryl told me how Open Text had all the Aspirin products that people need ready to deliver (like EMC), but was making a point to talk about and develop the Candy that people want. The recession won’t last forever and the market will shift.  Those that have their Candy dishes full will be in good shape.

I think I’d like to know that there was some Candy on the way from EMC.  The Aspirin is there, with more on the way as the SourceOne suite grows.  CenterStage is nice, but it is taking a long time so my excitement dwindles with every passing month.  The potential of a mobile CenterStage is also nice, but like the core product, it doesn’t feel real and it isn’t the primary message from EMC. Oh, Mark talked about it in his keynote, but it was about delivery, not about being social.

A Note to Mark Lewis

The deficit of strategy aside, I do want to say that Mark Lewis gave the best presentation I had ever seen him give. I’ve been critical in the past of his delivery.  Maybe he was off his game before or maybe he has gotten better. Regardless, given the material he was presenting, I was surprisingly engaged for most of the presentation.  I wasn’t excited or sucked into the presentation, but that was the material’s fault, not Mark’s.

I’m not sure if I specifically said this to Mark when I spoke to him later, but I will now…

Mark, thank you for making your keynote enjoyable and please keep doing whatever it is that you did to improve your style, even if it was just getting more sleep.  Your joke delivery needs work, or maybe the jokes themselves, but that isn’t something I expect from you. I expect you to make me excited to be there, to be working in our industry, and to be using your product. Given the message that was being delivered, you did an admirable job.

Now, about that message…

…Maybe EMC should just buy Jive and give us Candy from their dish.

• Application Architecture, new certification, includes:
  • Designing data and security models
  • Lifecycles and business processes
  • Tools and APIs – DFC, BOG, DFS, Server Methods….
  • Application frameworks and user interfaces – WDK, TaskSpace, Forms Builder
  • Ingestion, search, and content transfer
  • focus on not just how, but why and when
• System/Technical Architecture is about Hardware, Disk, OS, Scalability and Performance
• WDK improvements since 5.3:
  • Global DFC object cache across all sessions
  • About 75% smaller footprint
• “Materialization” is process for making a Light-weight sysobject into a normal sysobject
  • Materialization can be restricted
  • Can happen automatically or manually
• The Partition-based ingestion is designed for multi-million+ objects at once.
• Security Performance Improvements in D6.5 sp2
  • Two non-scaling issues
    • Many (1000+) groups-per-user, happens in rooms and DCE situations
    • Many accessors on an ACL list
  • Reducing caching helped
  • Improvements appear significant, but there may still be issues
• Test the data and security models
• Items pulled from Full Text are post-filtered at Content Server for Security
  • Users with highly restricted access that issue unselective queries can experience poor response time
  • Can customize Index Agent to pass security information into index for speed
  • EMC Search Services will have built-in Documentum security, significantly reducing this issue
• RPC trace can now be used, look at dfc.tracing.* properties in dfc.properties file
  • Support Note esg90107 has awk scripts for processing the trace files
  • Can filter by user name
  • D6 and up
• SourceOne information (Going fast here with time ending, will need to hit the slides)
  • Retention Services Archive controlled release data 2Q/3Q 2009
  • Limitations of FAST (14 mil objects) is why Content Server doesn’t serve Source One

Sitting still for the second session, though I may grab a quick cup of coffee.

Disclaimer

All information in this post was gathered from the presenters and presentation. It does not reflect my opinion unless clearly indicated (Italics in parenthesis). Any errors are most likely from my misunderstanding a statement or imperfectly recording the information. Updates to correct information are reflected in red, but will not be otherwise indicated.

All statements about the future of EMC products and strategy are subject to change at any time due to a large variety of factors.

(Now on SlideShare and YouTube)

• Focus is Delivering ROI (Solid recession topic)
• “I’m here to make you money, save you money, and help you keep your money”
• Focus is not on Vision, but on what is here now.
• ROI=Return on Information
• 1.8 Zetabytes of information, 95% unstructured and 85%  is unmanaged.
• Information Governance (1 of 6 focus areas, though only 5 shown on the slides)
  • Compliance
  • Solutions are going from Application Centric to Information Centric
  • Information is going from Static Placement to Dynamic Movement
  • Points to the SourceOne ROI calculator
  • EMC saw payback from SourceOne in 7 months and saved 60% on storage costs
• Information Centric Applications (2 of 6)
  • Composition
  • Static “Coded” Applications going to Dynamic “Composite” Applications, Composing the “music”
  • Documentum xCelerated Composition Platform – Case Management Framework renamed
  • Composite Business Applications are 50% more cost effective
• Information Connectivity (3 of 6)
  • Customer-Centricity
  • Silo’d repositories to Consolidated repositories and now to Federated
  • Virtual Information Management
  • Federated Search and RM (Virtual Retention Management)
  • Master Content Management – future thing (Sounds like SkyNet)
• Information Access (4 of 6)
  • Collaboration
  • Office access to Anywhere access
  • One user interface to any interface
  • Team to Community to Extended Enterprise Collaboration
  • Workstyle Diversity = Productivity
  • Blackberry client coming this year
• Information and Infrastructure (5 of 6)
  • Cloud
  • Physical frameworks to Virtual frameworks
  • Cloud “Layers” (The foresee the All Encompassing Fog is going to roll over the audience)
    • Infrastructure – VMWare vSphere
    • Services – EMC ATMOS – Amazon S3
    • Environments – Windows Azure
    • Applications – MS Office Online – Google Apps
  • Content Services for SalesForce.com
• CMA ranks higher in customer satisfaction when compared to other units in EMC (Are people happy or are the storage users upset?)

Okay, time for more coffee and then to hear Andrew Chapman do his SharePoint Deep Dive.

Disclaimer

All information in this post was gathered from the presenters and presentation. It does not reflect my opinion unless clearly indicated (Italics in parenthesis). Any errors are most likely from my misunderstanding a statement or imperfectly recording the information. Updates to correct information are reflected in red, but will not be otherwise indicated.

All statements about the future of EMC products and strategy are subject to change at any time due to a large variety of factors.

Victor is going to breeze through many of the things that haven’t changed in a year, so supplement these notes with last year’s notes.  These notes are “more accurate” if they conflict.

• Introducing RESTful services to complement DFS
  • Builds on on the DFS conceptual model and semantics
  • It supports XML and JSON representation
  • Coming this year, Early Access soon (Victor is not a product Manager, so easy on the dates)
• CMIS, hoping to have final by the end of the year
  • Plan to have final CMIS implementation for download day CMIS is finalized
  • CMIS will not be as efficient as DFS as they can implement capabilities specific to Documentum
• CenterStage design philosophy
  • Thin UI
  • Clear separation of presentation, application, and business logic
  • DFS using Java client library
  • Direct Web Remoting (DWR)
    • Need a mechanism to invoke RPC-style services from the browser (no realistic SOAP support)
    • Services are built without DWR dependencies (Glue code hooks DFS services and data model into DWR)
  • ExtJS 2.2/DWR 2.0
  • OSGI/Equinox
  • XUL provides the layout
  • More Services created to support CenterStage
• Key 6.5 feature is High Volume Server (see notes from last year and remember it is a separate license)
  • Batching: Groups multiple operations into one set of SQL statements to the database
  • Scoping: Reduce redundant currency checks
  • Light-Weight System Objects
    • Policies are applied to the Parent object now
    • Post-D6.5 may allow some policies to apply to a child object without spinning it back to full sysobject
  • Partitioning: Leverage RDBMS range partitioning capabilities to logically and physically separate data
  • Batching+Scoping+Light-Weight = 5x performance on ingestion
• Why SourceOne not using Content Server? Simple, FAST can’t handle the search for billions of emails!
• EMC Search Server (ESS)
  • Leverage xDB (XHive) and Lucene
  • Uses Documentum indexing open architecture
    • Indexing Server
    • Query plug-in
  • More than just FAST replacement
    • Low cost HA (n+1 Server based) (Now double)
    • Disaster Recovery
    • Data Management
    • VMWare support
    • NAS support
    • New Administration Framework (GUI and Web Services)
  • For migration, will have side-by-side option
  • Will be bundled with Documentum later, released before that
  • Native Security
  • 50 million objects per node v 20 mil per FAST (10 mil in my experience)
  • Utilizes new Content Processing Services (CPS) and ACS
  • Read-only collections
  • Cold collections
  • Enables facet computation on entire result set
  • Q3 2009???
• Virtual Content Management (VCM)
  • Meta Catalog with Repository adapters
  • Creates Proxy Object
    • Normal Documentum persistent object
    • Designed to link to content in an external system
    • Associated with corresponding repository adapter
  • Schema Definition (Maps attributes)
  • Two types of adapters
    • Search
    • Search and Update
  • CMIS adapter will be built once finalized (one of the drivers for their CMIS support)
  • Rapid Adapter Development Framework for writing custom adapters
• Operation Customization
  • Hidden, but available for use if critically needed

Reception in the Partner Pavilion and then the CMA party. Party-On Garth.

Disclaimer

All information in this post was gathered from the presenters and presentation. It does not reflect my opinion unless clearly indicated (Italics in parenthesis). Any errors are most likely from my misunderstanding a statement or imperfectly recording the information. Updates to correct information are reflected in red, but will not be otherwise indicated.

All statements about the future of EMC products and strategy are subject to change at any time due to a large variety of factors.

When I was up at AIIM, they made the announcement, held a fancy webcast or two, and posted material for all to see. Was it worth the wait?

What the Heck is SourceOne?

If you go watch the YouTube video EMC SourceOne Architecture: Scalability, Accessibility, you may be disappointed.  In it, Michael Brown covers the Email Archiving, called SourceOne Email Management. It is great and nice, but doesn’t really talk about the entire solution or how the Documentum Repository might play a part in the bigger picture.  He alludes to a bigger picture, but doesn’t cover it.

It is when you look at the briefing given by EMC management during the SourceOne launch that you see that there are three “products” currently released in the SourceOne “Family”:

• SourceOne Email Management: Email and instant messaging archiving (Instant Messaging!?!).  It replace the old EmailXtender product. I originally thought that it used the Documentum Content Server, High-Volume Server option, for storing these emails, but I now suspect that it doesn’t. One clue is that a related product they list DiskXtender and not Content Server.
• SourceOne Discovery Manager: Discovery and legal hold for EMC SourceOne Email Management archives. Doesn’t look like anything else, yet.
• SourceOne Discovery Collector: Indexing appliance to automate collection throughout the enterprise (This is StoredIQ I believe). Content identified can be held in a Documentum Repository or Centera and locked down.

I couldn’t attend the briefing in person as I was busy, but one curious note is how little Documentum is mentioned in the slides, even just as a repository.

Want to know the biggest selling point of this product? EMC uses the Email Management product themselves. Not a bad reference or test-bed.

Want to Know More?

So do I. There is a four-part webinar series, What You Don’t Manage Can Hurt You, coming up in May. The first of which is May 5, An IDC Perspective on Information Governance.

I suspect that to get more answers, I’m going to have to grill people at EMC World. The scariest part about this product launch is how little information I can find below the marketing speak.  I know EMC uses it.  I know people, that I trust, that are learning and/or using SourceOne that speak well of it.

There is too much mystery out there and the presentation line-up looks more like sales/marketing.  I have clients that need eDiscovery. I hate not being able to give them much substantive information on this. I know will be coming, but I’d like more now.

When people are presented with a lack of information, they think the worst. Lack of details around the storage of Instant Messages is just one of many gaps that I am having trouble closing. Chuck Hollis, a non-CMA person, gives the best write-up of the offering and offers the best part around the vision, I keep thinking of SourceOne not as an email archiving product, but as the first release of an enterprise ILM platform. Great vision, but when?

I am under-whelmed so far, but will withhold judgement for a month to see what else I can learn. Expect to hear more from me then.

Until then, a massive thought…I implement the archiving solution and I then declare email as a record into my RM solution. How many copies and who is managing what? I know what I’d choose….

The defendant founder of the competing company, within days of receiving the plaintiff’s complaint, disposed of his computer. He did so by taking the device 20 miles away to a construction site to get rid of it in a dumpster.

Doesn’t look good, does it? The defendant founder argued that his conduct was proper because he had been told that his computer had crashed and that it was beyond repair.

The judge did not buy this excuse and found that the founder’s conduct was in bad faith. The judge also determined that this conduct violated a court order that required production of all records of communications with the plaintiff’s former supplier and prospective customer–records that may have been contained on the disposed and destroyed computer.

He then uses this story to discuss the general issues associated with preserving data and penalties associated with failing to adequately do so.

The Court specifically finds, in light of what Becker did (traveling 20 miles to dispose of the computer in a construction site Dumpster) and when he did it (within days of receiving notice of APC’s lawsuit), that Becker acted in bad faith in order to prevent APC from discovering potentially damaging evidence. See Langley, 107 F.3d at 514 (Rule 37 sanctions may only be imposed where a party displays willfulness, bad faith, or fault). Although this conduct occurred prior to the Court’s order, it is enough that Becker’s culpable conduct “eventually culminated in the violation.” Id. (quoting Marrocco v. Gen, Motors Corp., 966 F.2d 220, 224 (7th Cir. 1992)). Therefore, because Becker acted in bad faith and violated a discovery order issued by this Court, Becker and SourceOne are subject to sanctions under Rule 37(b).

(emphasis added)

APC Filtration, Inc. v. Becker, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 76221 (N.D. Ill. Oct. 12, 2007)

Under the liberal standard of discovery relevance, material is discoverable if it is admissible or “reasonably calculated to lead to admissible evidence.” Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(b)(1). In this case, the allegations that support APC’s claims center on Becker’s conduct in communicating with various suppliers and customers within the vacuum filter and bag industry as well as his alleged misappropriation of proprietary information that was stored in computerized form. Becker stated in his affidavit that he used the computer for both business and personal reasons. Given the nature of the allegations and Becker’s use of the computer for business purposes, the contents of the computer were clearly discoverable.

Furthermore, Becker and SourceOne had reasonable notice that the computer could become the subject of discovery requests at the time that Becker threw the computer away. APC’s complaint was filed on March 15, 2007, and counsel for Defendants made his initial appearance on March 19, 2007. Becker admits to throwing the computer away sometime after March 21, 2007. As discussed above, notice of a complaint can put a litigant on notice that evidence is likely to be requested, triggering the duty to preserve. Cohn, 1995 WL 519968 at *5. In this case, Becker had notice based on the nature of APC’s allegations that the computer could become part of the discovery process. Because the computer’s contents were discoverable and Becker had reasonable notice that the computer could become the subject of a discovery request, Becker had a duty to preserve the computer as evidence prior to the date on which he discarded it. Therefore, this Court may impose sanctions pursuant to its inherent power.

APC Filtration, Inc. v. Becker, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 76221 (N.D. Ill. Oct. 12, 2007)