Check this out, though:

http://software.emc.com/products/software_az/index.jsp

There are currently 83 different “Documentum” branded products in their catalogue. Personally, if I were shopping for a project artifact management system for a small business environment (i.e., fewer than 500 employees), I’d be very turned off by the complexity of EMC’s product offering.

As a known framework-hater, my opinion is that under-architecture is almost always preferable to over-architecture. Simplicity nearly always trumps complexity. And the whole Documentum product landscape flies in the face of that preference.

I don’t think I’m the only one who feels that way. And I think I could leverage the complexity differential between my own software and the existing document management systems to sell more licenses.

The notion of project artifact is very compelling and you’re absolutely correct in that this could be applied across a broad range of industries. I don’t think that you’ll have too hard a job explaining what this is all about either – it’s just about managing and tracking the ‘things’ that are created as part of a project process.

Where you could really add value is traceability through your meta-data layer. Even on a small scale in my day-to-day job, finding project information that you just know was related to such and such an email or powerpoint can be a real chore and that’s with the help of things like ISYS and Google Desktop. Some time back I worked on a research project looking at, you guessed it, artifact management for software engineering. One of the most interesting things that dropped out of this was being able to create relationships between the artifacts.

The hard thing to balance is how generic your system will be. If it needs to much end-user configuration then some companies may not be able to invest the time to set it up. On the other hand, if it can’t be tweaked to an organisations needs it will be deemed too inflexible.

Looking forward to tomorrows post :-)

The reason why there aren’t any generic artifact management sw on the market might be because it is not easy at all to create this sort of thing generically! Or perhaps the creators of such sw did not have access to a broad range of clients, so they created sw tailored to whoever they were writing the application for.

This makes me wonder how Trump manages his projects. Does he have sw that allows him to dial into any of his ongoing projects and see their progress? Or does he have throngs of managers he talks to face to face? If I were in his position, I’d love to have a bunch of webcams following the whole thing. :)

We used eRoom, which was later purchased by Documentum, so it’s probably the product that Francesc is referring to. You can check it out here: http://software.emc.com/microsites/eRoom/index.jsp. IIRC, the software was in the 6-figure range to support a company with ~200 engineers.

One downside is that the market has a lot of players, but the upside is that most are targeting big installations. If you start with a niche and target SMB’s I think this would be a winner.

The other thing to consider is how you would advertise. The search engine space is very crowded for many of the key words associated with this type of product. It may be difficult to rise above the noise.

(If you have the book “Crossing the Chasm” this company is shown as a sample of a very expensive product with very few clients, and that it used the pharmaceutical sector as a headbeach to span to other sectors a general applications, very similar to yours).