Things I dont like!

Writing a blog is a challenge. You should really spend some quality time to think though topics do your resarch and then write. Writing a techincal blog is a bigger challenge as time spent on doing research is more then for a ordinary blog.

Things said and done lets start blogging. This time I am puting a list of things I donot like about UCM.

1. Support: Before cribing about the product and some of the intrinsic details I would like to mention that UCM support from Oracle is average. Most of the times support personel have no clue as to what is happening and what should be done. Agreed that Oracle has just acquired the product and doesnot have the required numbers to give best support considering the product is buggy and doesnot behave as mentioned in the documentation(actually most them do not!) support should be up to the mark so that the implementation teams doest not miss dead lines with your SR still in work in progress status.
2. Documentation: I find UCM documentation to be too prechy at times. We need product documentation in tutorial format. Some thing like FileNet and Documentum have where they teach you step by step on how to do things. They also have published there case study similar to revanna. I donot see any documents related to revanna other than explaning site studio capabilites.Only good thing about this is that it has a good book in the market by bex.
3. Folders: If ever oracle wants to get into serious document management it should beef up this component or still go ahead and do a redesign. Currently according to me this is very primitive. When ever you create a folder UCM gives it a unique id call collection id, this is done automatic and you have no control over this. Now if you have a situation where you have created a profile where all content ends up in particular folder and move that profile to other environament you have reset the default folder for the profile using the Collection id in each environament. I say give me some thing which i can control some thing in line of Content type, so that i need not worry about different environament when i am programming.
   
4. Site Studio Designer: This is a lousy IDE. This cannot even do a word wrap! While creating fragments this doesnot automaticaly do some basic manual things. Will eloborate more later.
5. Workflow Designer: UCM Workflow applet is very very primitive. It looks like it was created during the first version of Stellnet and nobody bothered to revisit the UI. Again if oracle wants to get into serious ECM it should beef up this gives us some good process design capability, should allow us to publish workflow as webservice, allow people to consume other workflows.. and blah balh blah....

Purging Content.

While designing a content management system there are three parameters that one should take care of.

1. Input: What goes into the CM system.
2. Manage: How to store and manage things inside the system
3. Output: What should leave the system or what should be retained in the system.

Input to the system is controlled by creating filters and restricting access to users on what can be added to the system.
We leverage taxonomy, content types, folders rules, events and other capabilities of the CM system to manage content that is inside the system.
Now what stays in the system and what leaves is a tricky questions. In the first place you invested on a CM to manage all your content, then why should some thing leave? Having a clear stratergy as to what stays in the system keeps the CM system lean and fit. It also saves you infrastructure and memory costs. You may argue that memory is getting cheaper day by day why care about it. The truth is recovery costs per GB is more than the actual GB cost.
When I started research as to how purge content in UCM environament I came across Jasons blog where is explains how to purge content using archiver with minimal customisation.