Having worked with document management (DM) type solutions for more than 15 years I have seen my share of successes and failures. I'm trying to focus on the positive, so... what makes a DM implementation successful? I've netted the answer down to five points. I should say, that these five points are predicated on the selection of viable DM software, which are innumerable.

One: Follow the KISS principle (at least to start)

While it's nice to dream of an all-encompassing, one size fits all enterprise solution for document management you may be setting yourself up for failure from the outset. So pick a focus area, think about the larger architectural picture, but start with something that has reasonable scope and is entirely manageable. 

Two: Strong Sponsorship

DM projects tend, over time, to have tentacles that touch many parts of an enterprise. From the start it's important to have executive buy-in and active support. Support from the top will give you the leverage you need to be successful in getting your DM solution deployed and (more importantly) used!

Three: Time to Results

Return on Investment, whether for a DM solution or a piece of capital equipment, is an important factor in business decisions. Delivering observable, positive results in the shortest time possible is an important factor in the success deployment of document management. The success of an initial prototype or deployment will in part determine the future life of your DM project.

Four: Deliver what you Promise

Clearly communicate scope, features, and timelines - then stick to it! Enough said.

Five: Solution Simplicity

The solution you buy/build/customize/integrate needs to be able to mold to the business rather than re-engineering all business processes to meet the needs of the software. Furthermore, the user interface/user experience needs to match the needs of the business process. That is, if the business process for an insurance adjuster is taking pictures in the field, tagging them and uploading them into DM, then the UI should be dead simple - no need for a full DM user interface.

From what I have observed, delivering complex, feature-laden user interfaces, and trying to make it fit for everyone, just doesn't work for most companies. The solution gets ignored, underused, or worse, misused. In my opinion, the provisioning of simplified user experience that matches business process holds significant weight in the success/failure curve for DM projects.

Has the following happened to you...

Just finished editing a Nuxeo document with about 15 pieces of metadata. Forgot to hit Save and navigated away from the page. Wondered why your changes didn't show up. And then the 'doh' moment - damn, forgot to hit Save. Annoyed I re-type the changes and save the document.

I've had the exact same thing happen when saving local security rights - add the right but forget to hit the Save button just below the newly added rights!

If only there were a way to automatically warn users leaving an edited, but unsaved, page. This time and frustration saving functionality would be a welcome addition to Nuxeo.

For a simple HTML page this is trivial, for an aggregated Nuxeo page it is a little more challenging. I have had this happen to me and several clients have also asked about this functionality so I thought it worthwhile adding to my RFI wish list!

I really like what's happening with themes and styling in DM. Creating custom look and feel has become much easier in the latest release. With pages, flavors, and CSS styling comes a flexibility that henceforth did not exist in DM. Styling has become another configuration item, rather than a mystical journey into big and ugly XML file requiring a modicum of magic to get the result you wanted.

I was a saddened a bit to see this new approach hadn't propagated through to DAM. When I went to perform a comparatively simple branding task in a Nuxeo deployment with DAM and DM I found the 'flavor' extension point only applied to DM... So the following XML, which I thought would change the logo in all places only showed up in the DM UI.

    <extension target="org.nuxeo.theme.styling.service" point="flavors">
        <flavor name="mybranding" extends="default">
            <logo>
                <path>/img/Custom-Logo-36x36.png</path>
                <previewPath>/img/Custom-Logo-36x36.png</previewPath>
                <width>32</width>
                <height>32</height>
                <title>alt</title>
            </logo>

              ...

To get the logo to change in DAM I had to revert back to pre-5.5 approach. Easy enough change once you realize what's going on, but slightly confusing at first when your logo insists on not changing.

I know this will eventually be rationalized. I just hope it's sooner than later.

Subtitle: Nuxeo - Room for Improvement - Part 3

The DAM UI is built for the consumer of Digital Assets. As a search-centric UI, I think Nuxeo has done a great job making the interface usable and practical. If you need to find an asset then you have great tools at hand.

If you are a digital asset contributor then you will more than likely work in both the DM and DAM interfaces. Because the DAM UI is search-centric the flexibiliy and power of the DM interface is almost completely hidden.

There is another group of users that sit between consumers and contributors. I call them reviewers and approvers - often not the originators of content or necessarily the end consumer. They have special needs that demand additional rights. It would be nice if this group could live in the DAM UI and complete there tasks.

Some of the DM functionality that is important for the DAM interface:

1. Workflow - probably a topic worthy of discussion on it's own, however, the focus for now would be BATCH workflow and BATCH approval - simliar to Batch Edit! When a new project has 400 assets imported they could be reviewed and approved in BATCH mode from within the DAM UI.

2. Publishing - a natural extension of the DM interface, but the ability for DAM users to initate publishing (in BATCH) of selected assets

3. Setting Alerts - if you work with assets on a campaign and somebody updates 30 key renderings then you would like to know. Again, for the DAM-only consumer it would be great to have this ability in the DAM UI.

Of course there are more but that's all i have time for at the moment.

Given that I'm working with DAM at the moment thought I would critique the current (5.5) version and suggest a couple of areas where there is room for improvement!

When 5.5 was released the alignment and integration of DAM/DM was a notable achievement. There are as I found still differences under the cover. A simple, but surprising difference - when I added in a new icon to replace the standard nuxeo logo I used the new 5.5 styling service. This worked for everything but DAM which still uses pre-5.5 styling (at least as far as I can see). From an ease of branding perspective it would be great if these were aligned across all 5.5 products and not just DM.

More importantly, in investigating custom filtering widgets I noticed that the FilterActions.java class has hard-coded Asset document definitions. I found this because I wanted to split out office documents into true office documents and PDF files. Adding a file type PDF and making it show up in the filter requires some work (beyond the scope of this blog entry) but it will only work by customizing and overriding the FilterActions class. The current class has a static arraylist that limits DAM asset types to File, Picture, Video and Audio. It would be much more flexible if this list were dynamic; based either on contribution or (even better) by any type contribution that has the facet Asset!

[Added 2012.02.08] And a recent post to Nuxeo Answers makes me pine for already-integrated Adobe XMP support!

Anyways, some DAM food for thought.

>> Nuxeo - Room for Improvement - Part 1