Craig’s Musings

News about TownSquare is making its way across the Internet. I’m not surprised that Chris Pratley has a hand in this venture either. He was the original creative force behind OneNote, a tool that quickly found its way into my “appbox” as a mainstream application/tool.

As Chris recalls, apparently this caught the attention of Jeff Raikes, which led to the following:

Jeff had a two-part mission for me that was simple to say and hard to do. Basically he said, “help the division try more ideas”, and “explain to the world and the company what our long term vision is for productivity”.

Since moving over to be the GM of Office Labs, Chris & Co. have been busy working on what some have called “SharePoint + Facebook.” Since I’m not a Microsoft employee, I haven’t been able to test drive TownSquare first hand. Perhaps, after tomorrow at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, this will soon change.

Update 6/11/2008: Digging around a bit more, I see that Chris is presenting “Accelerating Innovation within the Enterprise: The Value of Rapid Prototyping and User Insights” today with Nelle Steele, User Experience - Ethnographer, Microsoft Office Labs. This article on Nelle’s SMB work only increases my interested in TownSquare.

During EMC World last week, my Grenoble colleague Pierre-Yves “Pitch” Chevalier presented this subject on behalf of Marc Brette, who couldn’t make the event this year but authored the presentation. Pie attended the session and blogged about it here. Having received the presentation from Pitch and Marc, you can download it here. Cheers…

Tom and I were able to present to another great set of attendees–lots of healthy curiosity and great questions. Now that the labs have been conducted, here are the presentation slides–version from today, which was slightly modified from Monday’s deck.

It’s been a great talking with a lot of folks about DFS, DSE, etc. Thanks to everyone who shared their current experience with DFS, their ideas and their issues. The product will be better because of you. Thanks!

Although the video quality is poor compared to the HD-like video onsite, I still think the message behind this “what is enterprise content management about” video from EMC is quite effective, especially for those that don’t want techno-jargon (i.e. my parents).

This afternoon, colleagues Mike Mohen and Paul Kwitkin presented a well-attended session, “Documentum Foundation Services – Best Practices and Real World Examples.” It’s always a good thing to have someone else be able to tell folks how well your software performs under load and back it up with hard numbers and context. Usually this session takes about four hours to present in depth; so, Mike and Paul did a good job distilling the essence down to just an hour or so.

Mike and Paul work in CMA’s Professional Services organization, helping customers deploy enterprise solutions that typically involve out of the box services from DFS as well as custom service development and custom service consumer (solution) development. What we do in engineering it what Professional Services does in terms of building services and service consumers. It’s also the very same advice offered at today’s session, which will be repeated on Thursday. So, this material is not just about you, our audience, but it’s very much about EMC, too.

I’ve already asked Mike for his presentation, demos and source code; so, once I receive this content, I’ll make it available here. It should also become available on the just-launched Documentum Solution Exchange.

Earlier today, I sat in on Victor Spivak’s “Documentum Architecture Deep Dive” session. (Pie blogged about this session in a fair bit of detail here and here.) As you might expect, DFS was a prominently discussed within the broader context of all Documentum architecture. (For those who don’t know, Victor is EMC Content Management and Archiving division’s Chief Architect. Victor is also an EMC Fellow and a really good guy.)

It’s really quite exciting to see such a consistently strong turn-out for the developer-oriented sessions at this year’s EMC World conference–much stronger than last year. It’s a privilege to have so many folks interested in what you’ve worked so hard with others to produce–both to tell you what works and what doesn’t.

Already this week I’ve received great feedback that will make DFS an even better product in future releases. Once my customer meetings this week subside a bit, I hope to share what I’ve learned with you here in more detail.

Update 5/21/2008: Here are the slides Mike and Paul presented. Looks like the real world examples will be available over on the solution exchange soon. For example, I just uploaded the DFS Windows shell namespace extension for Windows Explorer created by colleague John Sweeney here. Cheers.