Fusion ECM

I am struggling to find a rational link between the 30 year anniversary of the original release of StarWars (it wasn't even "A New Hope" yet) and Universal Content Management.  I'm not going to try real hard though, fanboys rarely need to.

A big "woot" to StarWars and George Lucas from the ECM Product team.  I'll be celebrating with a private screening.

To George Lucas, if you ever want to chat about Enterprise Content Management, give us a ring.  I am sure we can help you out!

Posting late on a Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend, I feel like a politician wanting to issue bad news in the hope that by next Tuesday everyone will have forgotten about it.

Well, no nefarious intent here.  I wanted to respond to James McGovern who answered my last post quickly and insightfully (James McGovern's Response).  However, before I get into that, let me state up front some of the constraints I'm working under.

It's a pretty big shift for those of us who came from Stellent to Oracle and one of those changes is that we've gone from a 500 person company where everyone knew pretty much everyone else to a 65,000 person company.  Heck, Oracle probably has more lawyers than Stellent had staff (joke / hyperbole). That means we are governed much more by policies and rules and have a little less freedom to be quite as open as we might once have been.  In particular, it means I'm not allowed to discuss future product offerings in any kind of public forum. 

With that disclaimer out of the way (imagine it being read very fast in a monotone like those radio ad announcers), let's address as many of James' points as I can:

1.  SAML/XACML support sort of comes under the "future offerings", so I have to be careful.  Bex Huff actually responded on James' comments with some reasoning as to why the support hasn't been released up to now.  I can say that Oracle has generally been very supportive of open standards and integration with the Identity and Access Management portions of Fusion Middleware seems to be a very obvious future direction.  Personally, as I deal with clients and colleagues in services, I know that access control and authentication is very important. We read daily about information leaks and the embarassment or legal implications that come from that.  Our aim is to distribute knowledge and information effectively, and security is a crucial part of that process.  So support for open standards and better authentication is certainly something I'll be pushing in my role.

2. WSDLs - that's much easier.  Support for SOAP has been native in Content Server since version 7.5.  Before that it was provided as a component.  There's a WSDL Generator component that allows you to create WSDLs for any Content Server service you like (the most common services such as checkin and docinfo are provided as samples).  As far as standards go....., that's certainly an interesting idea for us to throw around - and it may be that there is work in progress on this that I'm unaware of.

3.  Binding to AD / LDAP.  This is something we have supported for a long time and is used in the majority of our enterprise accounts.  If the solution is Microsoft end to end (AD / IIS / IE), we get single sign on with the users' login tokens being passed to the Content Server.  More commonly, though, in mixed environments we can bind to AD or LDAP for authentication and authorization and pass whatever user properties we define to be stored as user metadata. It's then quite common to use this data (something like department, job level, or location) to filter search results, route in a workflow, or prepopulate metadata entry screens (note that this is completely independent of portal personalization).  I'm not aware of MS Certificate Services integrations currently, but we have integrated with external certificate authorities in the past in services projects.  I wonder if there's enough demand to productize something like that?

4. Convergence - I think I'll defer to Billy on this.

5. Trackback / Blog management - the ECM team doesn't currently control the blog software and I probably shouldn't comment on internal systems.  Trackback is probably something that Billy and I missed when setting up the blog, so bear with us on that and apologies in the meantime.

If you read this far, thanks for your patience - this turned into a longer post than I planned, but the points raised were valid and interesting, and I hope the responses here  are somewhat useful. 

It's currently 86 deg F / 30 deg C here in New York City, so perhaps it's time for me to step away from the monitor and enjoy the first real day of summer.  This weekend is the Memorial Day weekend in the US, so enjoy the long weekend if you are in the US, Spring Bank Holiday in the UK, and Whitmonday in the rest of Europe