Autonomy to acquire Interwoven

There aren’t too many established companies in the Enterprise Content Management space, so when one changes hands lots of questions are bound to come pouring out.  I happened a few years ago when Hummingbird sold their ECM business to Open Text and it is about to happen again, with Autonomy picking up Interwoven last week.

In theory, this is a great development as it means integrating one of the better turnkey Document Management platforms (Interwoven) with a phenomenal search and archival platform (Autonomy).  But the devil is in the details, and there are a LOT of details to be discussed in this deal. 

For example, Autonomy took their acquisition of Zantaz and the associated archiving product and integrated it pretty tightly with their IDOL search engine product.  They also took a look at all the sub-2000 user sites where it was installed and pretty much told them to buzz off.  That’s not a great way to make friends, especially when one of their primary markets is the legal industry where there aren’t too many huge clients to be had.  If they take a similar stance with the Interwoven products the legal market is in HUGE trouble. 

Of course, Interwoven’s legal business is a result of their acquisition of iManage years ago, so it really isn’t the compelling reason for the acquisition by Autonomy.  This could end up with the legal industry in a world of hurt should Autonomy marginalize their business in this area.

For now I suppose it is a waiting game, but the Open Text acquisition didn’t result in anything good for the Hummingbird customers and the iManage/Interwoven deal didn’t really do much good either.  Autonomy has a great search engine and infrastructure, but if they can’t figure out how to scale it down then legal is in big trouble.

New database option on the horizon

Sun is making a move to shake up the database market space today, dropping a billion dollars to buy MySQL AB, the company behind MySQL. Now, in addition to Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server it looks like the MySQL database solution is going to have a major company behind it, with Sun providing global technical and integration support. It also looks like they are going to be putting together a pretty good package for management and other complimentary software components, so that looks very positive for the industry on the whole.

Up until now Interwoven's WorkSite and Open Text's DM products were limited to MS SQL Server and Oracle for the database platform. This may open up a new option, should the vendors choose to support MySQL now that it has some real teeth behind it.

On a side note, where does Sun keep finding all this money?

DM 5.2 (finally) Released!!

After many, many, many months of waiting and at least two false starts, the DM 5.2 platform has finally been released. I haven't seen the press release yet, but the software is on the Open Text site for download.

This is the release that includes support for Microsoft Office 2007, so there are a number of folks looking to get there hands on it and start testing it out. Good luck!

On updates and upgrades

Exchange Server 2007 SP 1 has been available for less than 48 hours, and I got to do the install on our network this morning. Piece of cake. The process is well documented within the setup executable, including links out to TechNet instructions for the more detailed processes, like upgrading an SCC cluster. The new features seem to be working well at first blush, including Public Folder access in OWA. SCR testing will have to wait until the week starts up and I have some time to build the extra server and play with it more.

Also on the update & upgrades front this week, in a surprise to almost no one, Open Text delayed the DM 5.2 release, again. This time the warning from them was actually rather dire:

Final internal testing, as well as testing conducted by our Preview customers, uncovered critical issues which mandate the halt of the release at this time. Some of the events we consider critical are any that cause data loss and/or corruption and use cases that produce unacceptable performance metrics. An example of a data loss event we encountered during the final testing for this release occurred with our capture of email thread data. Tests indicated that Outlook mail message ID’s and parent message ID’s were not being captured properly in our database. Therefore, while the email and/or attachment was captured successfully, all metadata was not. Under our quality assurance guidelines this constitutes data loss and mandates that we hold back the release until a fix is implemented, user acceptance tested, and regression tested. An example of unacceptable performance metrics was experienced, with Preview customer testing of this release, around the interval of time taken to present end users certain aspects of the newly designed Save User Interface. Again, as this test was not successful it warranted implementing the required fix and following up with subsequent user acceptance testing, and regression testing.

I'm glad to see them actually performing QA and holding back on releases rather than just pushing it out like Hummingbird used to, though it is a bit strange to me that there are still issues with email data loss since that was one of the very early DM5 problems that we encountered and they did fix it at one point.

So get out there and upgrade your Exchange 2007 servers, and don't hold your breath on the DM 5.2 release; the new estimated date is December 2007.

Another Delay for Open Text

In a not all that unsurprising move, Open Text has delayed yet again the release of their latest DM client. The DM 5.2 upgrade was most recently expected to be made available today, but late in the afternoon Open Text released an announcement indicating that the release would be delayed two more weeks:

*UPDATE* – The release of Livelink ECM - eDOCS™ DM 5.2 scheduled for November 16, 2007 has been delayed. The expected release date is November 30, 2007. We will let you know as soon as it is available.

The product was originally announced in late August at the annual ILTA conference, but has yet to materialize in the three months since then. As an added bonus, parts of their site seems to be down right now so I can't even get a clean link to the press release about the delay to share, but the email came out with the announcement, and it is definitely real.

One of these days they'll finally get this release out. That will be great news for their customers waiting for a client that supports Office 2007 integration, something that their main competitors have had out for at least a couple months now.

On the plus side, Open Text has opened an office in Redmond to get closer to Microsoft. They also have a podcast as well as a press release out regarding their SharePoint integration, which seems to be pretty decent.

Still, there hasn't been a product release since the Open Text purchase of Hummingbird, which is just a little disconcerting.

Open Text LiveLink ECM – eDOCS and the future

The Open Text LiveLinkUp conference was held October 22 – 26, 2007 in Orlando, Florida. Among the topics covered were the overall roadmap for their LiveLink ECM product line, as well as their plans for the eDOCS Suite, and SharePoint 2007 integration.

There were several announcements made on the eDOCS DM line. First, the announcement that DM6 will be released again for general availability. Open Text stated that for new installations, they will be selling DM6. Regarding Office 2007 and Windows Vista support on DM6, you will have to wait until the first quarter of 2008 for the release of the DM 6.0.5 version. Or, if you are in a hurry, you can install the next version of the DM5 line, labeled as DM 5.2. The 5.2 release has been (re)scheduled for November 16th, 2007, and will have full Office 2007 and Vista report. KKL has installed and configured a preview of the DM 5.2 release and is currently testing it in a research environment. DM 5.2 is an upgrade, and not a full-installer; it requires a DM 5.1.0.5 SR1 or higher installation already in place.

The upcoming DM 5.2 and DM 6.0.5 releases will be the baseline in Open Text’s plan to integrate the eDOCS Suite into their overall LiveLink ECM product line and Enterprise Library Services. 2008 will bring integration from eDOCS to Open Text’s Enterprise Connect and the Enterprise Library Services (ELS) backend. Enterprise Connect is basically a complete rewrite of the HECMO client that Hummingbird created a few years back. It plugs right into Outlook and will have modules to the other LiveLink products, not just eDOCS. With the Enterprise Library Services integration, you’ll be able to mark a DM document as a record, and then retention policies from the ELS would be applied.

Several of the features that were in the initial release of DM6 have been rolled back into the DM 5.2 release. Among these is the new and improved Dynamic Views for Matter Centricity. This, coupled with the fact version 5.2 will have the Office 2007/Vista integration before DM6 has it, leaves some questions whether there will ever be a clean upgrade path from DM5 to DM6. At this point, it appears they are focusing on two separate version lines. However, Open Text did mention that they are trying to rework the two versions so that a DM5 client can talk to a DM6 server, which would allow for a phased upgrade.

Look for further announcements on the future of the this product from Open Text, and an analysis of Open Text’s announcements from KKL.

--Thanks to Brian for reporting back from the event with this information!