BrilliantLeap: Blog: Get Webcited!

Get Webcited!
May 22, 2008

I've received a number of e-mails from folks who are not at EMC World asking "What exactly is Magellan about? Will it interface with MySpace or Facebook? Will it be integrated with WordPress for blogging? I even heard something about iPhone...

I posed these same sort of questions to Whitney Tidmarsh while she was waiting to be interviewed in the International Press Room at EMC World. And while I don't have a direct quote to offer,her answer was, more or less, yes, yes, our general plan is to let clients use whatever collaborative/social networking/mobile delivery platforms they choose, we'll try to support them, but not in the beta version, not in Magellan ESSENTIALS.

I don't intend for this latter part to sound like a downer; in fact, I think a small,limited-featured start is a good idea. Marketing gurus like Guy Kawasaki say that being the second entrant into a space isn't a losing proposition and adds that rolling a full-featured product out before the kinks have been worked out is a mistake. I second that... Users want to use stuff that works, not sit around thinking about how cool it will be if it finally does.

In any case, what Magellan will do, according to EMC's CMA division president Mark Lewis, is to provide client code that grabs and synthesizes information from wikis, blogs, mashups and the like for the Documentum repository.

The demo of Magellan was impressive, even to web-junkie like me. Information-filled bubbles popped-up when Whitney (who looks like a younger, curvier, prettier Vanna White) pointed to certain tagged words; there was even a demo of how google maps could be accessed to find contextually relevant information (the demo pointed to all the carpet stores in an x mile radius from a selected location).

The user-experience was richer and more friendly than most anything I've seen related to Documentum. I didn't have to ask, Why is this cool?... Because it was. The look, the feel, and the content itself is exactly what developers, managers, architects and project owners want to deliver to their end users. No one wants to use tired technology at work, and cool stuff at home. GenY and Millennial workers simply won't have it.

As I mentioned before, EMC's decision to empower knowledge workers in the ECM space is to be applauded.

"Behind the firewall" shouldn't correlate to "no fun" or feels like I'm working in a prison."
If you want to be the first to get a taste of it all, here's the link Registration for EMC Magellan Essentials Beta Community Access.

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