My 'First ECM'

There's a great little conversation, recently started by my former OT'er Cheryl Mckinnon and a friend of her's, running around some ECM blogs out there. The premise is to tell the story of how you got started in the ECM world. You can read some of the 'first ecm' stories here http://wordofpie.com/2009/09/08/my-first-content-management-application/#comment-7087

Here's mine...

I actually came to the ECM world via a very WCM focused perspective. My first ECM/WCM project was actually a set of home grown tools written in Perl. Around 1997-98 I was hired by a great start-startup named Interactive8 in NYC. Like many we were capitalizing on the dotcom bubble and had developed the online presence for several companies ahead of the curve in creating their online brand; A&E Television (biography.com, historychannel.com, etc.), M&M Mars, DeBeers Diamonds, Maybelline… Anyway, we had a creative team, a strategy team, and my technical team that was responsible for the light web development of the time (online quizzes, polls, and a cool e-comm store on a customized implementation of Intershop) and running our own hosting center. When I arrived, a typical day was creative folks mocking up screens, HTML/production folks making it into something browsers could view, and us writing Perl/MySQL apps and getting the stuff hosted and replicated. That obviously didn’t scale so we actually wrote some slick little apps that would do things like allow copywriters to save text files in a certain directory that a cron job would pick up and update relevant html files.

Well, capitalizing on the bubble…the tail end of the bubble, we merged with 7 other companies and did an IPO and formed Luminant Worldwide. One of the other 7 companies was Align Solutions from Houston where I met Mike Alsup, Quack, and colleagues. They quickly educated me on the in’s and out’s of DCTM and core docman. Soon after that I was on a project for a large telecomm where we integrated DCTM 4i, Verity K2, and Epicentric portal.

So, my ‘first’ I still have to give to our custom tools for wcm. My first ‘commercial’ ECM project goes to DCTM.

Great idea Cheryl and Laurence!