Interviews with John Newton and Robert Glushko

Yesterday I listened to two long and interesting podcasts by IT Conversations. One is an interview with John Newton, one of the founders of Documentum and now running Alfresco. The other is an interview with Robert Glushko about 'Document Engineering'.

The interview with Newton is interesting for several reason. For one, Newton was at the beginning of content management software and gives a nice overview of the history of this world. Furthermore he also talks about the future of this market and why Alfresco (open source ECM) is and will be a player in that field. He also talks about "the end of enterprise software". Finally, not to mention more, he also gets into handling structured and unstructured information in a unified way (time: 59:00). Something that most vendors don't address.

The talk with Glushko is interesting too. It's interesting to hear him talk about documents (12:00) and his shift from a technology approach to documents, to a more user/services approach. And in this context he also talks about "services science" (time 37:00). Finally he also gives comments on the book/statement that "Everything is miscellaneous", implying that social tagging e.g. will be enough to categorize and classify documents instead of (also) using semantic categories. He disagrees with this statement and describes a combined approach. (time 48:00)

Note: The time when the topics I mentioned are dealt with in the podcast is between brackets.

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