Inevitably, a prospective client’s first question is, “How fast can it load my [insert number here] files?” Our pat answer is, “How fast do you need them loaded?” I think that’s a fair answer to an inherently unfair question. Obviously the rate at which Caliente can import content files relies on several variables outside the control of Caliente, or Armedia, or sometimes even the client.

For example:

• the speed of a client’s network infrastructure can add latency to the process;
• the size of the content files being imported can also add to latency;
• the speed of the hosting hardware running Caliente and the resources available to it can affect performance;
• the capacity of the CMS to ingest the content can affect performance;
• the complexity of any transformations required to the metadata or content before loading can add latency to the process;
• dependence on external resources (e.g., looking up additional metadata from an external system) can add latency to the process;
• drive and/or database contention among processes running on the hosting machine.

These and other factors all effect how quickly Caliente can load a customer’s files. The good news – and the justification for the answer given – is that there are numerous configurations and techniques Armedia can employ to ensure Caliente can load a customer’s files in the time frame required.

All that said, I think what most customers are looking for when they ask that questions is a benchmark — honest to goodness statistics, not anecdotal explanations about performance. So, following is a quick benchmark I performed to provide hard evidence of Caliente’s performance characteristics.

The entire benchmark was run on a virtual machine hosted on my laptop. The virtual server was running Windows 2003, with 2 CPUs (2.2MHz) and 4GB of RAM. The virtual server was running Caliente, SQL Server 2005, and Documentum Content Server 6.7. For test content I used a variety of files downloaded from textfiles.com, the Gutenberg project, and binaries from the image itself.

Here are some statistics about the test corpus:

• corpus file count: 25,890 files;
• corpus size: 3.31 GB;
• average file size: 133 KB;
• minimum file size: 168 bytes;
• maximum file size: 36.9 MB.

I ran Caliente in “hot folder” mode, which simply means it waited for me to drop files into a watched folder, and then it processed them. Each content file was accompanied by a metadata file that contained a set of five attributes to be set on the Documentum object (dm_document) when it was imported.

Here are the benchmark results:

• total files processed: 25,890;
• total files imported: 25,890;
• total processing time: 00:52:31 (hr:min:sec);
• rates:
  • 0.122 sec / file;
  • 8.22 files / sec;
  • 0.935 sec / MB;
  • 1.07 MB / sec.

A few notes about this benchmark:

• To monitor performance for Caliente meant turning on detailed logging and running other hardware monitoring processes (e.g., Microsoft’s Performance MMC, and Task Manager). Monitoring performance like this inherently introduces load and latency that otherwise would not exist, thus affecting the results of the benchmark. It is sort of a computer analog to physics’ observer effect. Therefore, the benchmark metrics listed above could be improved by turning off all of this monitoring and debugging.  Not surprising, my monitoring of the import process revealed that disk I/O was the greatest bottleneck in my environment.
• If you were to run this benchmark on a different server or in a different environment, you would likely receive different results — even if you used the same test corpus and configuration of Caliente. That’s just the nature of benchmarks; they are only valid in very controlled situations. However, they are a good indicator of performance as long as you understand the conditions of the benchmark.

The point I want to make is this: Caliente is capable of processing and importing an impressive volume of content, and can be tuned and configured to meet your performance requirements in whatever environment you run it. With Armedia’s vast experience with content-related migration and migration tools like Caliente, we can assure you that we can meet your import/migration performance requirements, whatever they may be.

Private Sector businesses unintentionally erect barriers to participation and inclusion for people with disabilities; however, a shift in perspective can fundamentally change their approach to accessibility (i.e., the staircase creates the barrier, not the wheelchair). Agencies that adopt a proactive position—actively seeking to prevent access barriers—will do much better than those who address accessibility as an accommodation “they have to do.”

2. Manage Accessibility

The Section 508 manager for your office must be visible, backed by policies that lend it authority, and have access to IT decision-makers. There are many accessibility stakeholders within an agency, and to establish and maintain relationships with those components, organizational placement and structure are primary concerns for management.

3. Treat Accessibility like Security

Much like security, businesses dedicate resources to accessibility and Section 508 reluctantly. They see it as a legal obligation while overlooking the benefits—improved usability for all users, increased productivity for employees with disabilities, and ability to provide government services. Under resourcing accessibility underestimates the consequences—slipping project schedules, cost overruns to retrofit projects whose design did not include accessibility, and the consequences of legal action that can include judges making your business’s IT decisions.

4. Design and Plan for Accessibility

Designing for accessibility starts at the concept phase, and thus requires formal inclusion in multiple phases of an organization’s development and procurement life cycles. Having a single process approval gate at the end of a project is not sufficient, because by then it is too late. Large and important project approval will likely trump retrofitting for accessibility, and adopting an inaccessible project exposes your business to avoidable legal risk. Retrofitting applications and remediating accessibility issues is more costly, difficult, and time consuming than addressing accessibility at a project’s design phase, so take a proactive approach and place accessibility requirements into the life cycle early and often.

5. Impose Targeted Standards

Ensure Section 508 standards are included in your business policies, development life cycle processes.  Describe how your business will interpret the Section 508 standards and how they integrate with other agency specific accessibility requirements. Specify how your business will evaluate accessibility requirements.

6. Test and Validate

Your business must evaluate and test products, applications, and electronic content if it wants positive and measurable accessibility outcomes. Vendor claims and, for that matter, agency development group claims are meaningless without scrutiny and a method to measure accessibility progress. As you prioritize what is tested, understand that validation is fundamental to improving accessibility.

7. Study and Use Best Practices

Successful accessibility programs have many practices in common. Benefit from the best practices applicable to your business, continue to evaluate and mature your accessibility program by learning from others, and participate in communities of practice.

8. Participate in and Join Communities of Practice

Communities of practice are important for sharing ideas, expertise, and creating a uniform marketplace for E&IT. Participate in Section 508 Coordinator workshops, interagency ad hoc committees, and comment on Notices of Public Rule Making. Consider participating in communities of practice beyond US Federal agencies. Section 508 spotlights the federal sector, but outside communities of practice are eager for agency participation. Take advantage of their wealth of expertise, creativity, technical guidance, process approaches, and policy examples.

9. Develop a ROI Strategy Around Inclusivity

All things considered, a business outside-in view of performance benchmarks (Earnings Per Share, Shareholder Value, stake-holder value) is not fundamentally different from an inside-out (Topline, Bottom-line, Growth, internal value creation) perspective. All of these are different manifestations of Return on Investment, the improvement of which is a top priority of every businesses executive management.

The implication for technology companies is that their solutions must add teeth to ROI improvement by aligning with their customer’s value creation objectives and alleviating their pain points. In other words, they must think of themselves as providers of outstanding business solutions and not merely brilliant technology.

Since cost reduction is the cornerstone of ROI management, businesses are constantly looking out for ways to improve efficiency and productivity to bring down the per unit cost of “doing business”. However, there is a limit to how far costs can be cut. For instance, fixed costs towards hardware, networking, physical infrastructure et al can be reduced under innovative leasing, outsourcing and hosting arrangements, but still make for heavy expenditure.

Hence, since total costs can never be brought down to zero, the solution must lie elsewhere. The automobile sector, and more recently, the telecom industry are great examples of how to push up ROI by lowering per unit cost, with volume acting as the game changer.

A parallel can be drawn in the banking industry, where cost can be expressed per transaction, customer, unit of revenue, unit of capital deployed, channel and so on. Quite simply, an increase in any of the aforementioned at the same total cost shows up as a healthier bottom-line and ROI. This builds a strong case for replacement of legacy core systems with a modern alternative that can support a continuous increase in the scale of business for years, at the cost of a one-time investment. Businesses, which typically view core transformation as a burden on expenditure, need to adjust their perspective accordingly.

Apart from increasing the volume, customer base or transaction “denominator” to cut per unit cost, ROI may be enhanced by a cross-sales “multiplier”, which is explained as follows. Each time a customer interaction succeeds in selling an additional product, it not only doubles the productivity of that event, but also saves the cost of resources needed to make a similar sale at a future date and therefore “multiplies” the impact on ROI.

So, the magic formula for ROI improvement prescribes stretching an investment as far as possible to serve an expanding business, for instance, scaling up transactions by adding new channels, acquiring more customer accounts through right-selling and enlarging the customer base through inclusivity. While the prioritization of these actions will depend upon the  business objectives, the core platform is a common facilitator in all.

10. Market your Accessibility Position

Actively market your new stance on accessibility and watch your customer base grow.

Question 1: Debra, as we both know there is much work to be done in the world of Accessibility.  Can you tell our readers why you became involved in Accessible IT?

Answer:   I was always a technologist and my Dad was a technologist before me.  My father passed away in late January 2013 and we will miss him.  My dad gave me the technology bug before there really was technology.  He worked for AT&T and ran their computers – the computer was the size of a huge government building.  Probably now that computing power that he managed in that huge facility would fit on a tiny thumb drive.  My daughter Sara Ruh, 25 years old and born with Downs syndrome inspired me to start TecAccess.  I knew Sara who was capable of great things, even though some experts claimed otherwise. So I decided to prove them wrong, I created a path to empowerment and success for those with disabilities.  I founded TecAccess to acknowledge the contributions of people with disabilities in both the workplace and the marketplace and provide accessibility consulting solutions to companies around the world.

Now I look forward to taking our work to the next level with Ruh Global.  Sara joined me as my CIO (Chief Inspiration Officer) and I will be partnering with many other firms to help spread the word that inclusion, accessibility and diversity is critical for everyone.  The world is a better place when we can all contribute and each person should be allowed to contribute to their fullest abilities.  In-Accessible technology should not get in someone’s way of working and participating in society.  We still have a lot of work to do but I am hopeful that we are on the right track.

Question 2: So what ideas do you have for us to more effectively get the word out to CIO’s in order to get them to embrace Accessible IT?

Answer:  I believe that the only way to move our industry forward is to blend accessibility into the Life Cycle processes.  As long as Accessibility is an afterthought we will not be able to blend it into the process.  We need to make Accessibility part of the process just like Security and Privacy.   We also need to teach accessibility in colleges and universities.  Not just one web accessibility course but accessibility should be in all ICT and engineering courses.   No one should graduate with an ICT or engineering degree without understanding how to assure Accessibility in every aspect of Life Cycle.

Question 3: What would you advise a company just starting down the path to accessibility? Do you take care of the internal documents and applications so you can hire Americans with disabilities, or do you begin with your external facing website to ensure access to your information and the company’s message is reaching the largest audience?

Answer:  Great question – I always advise clients to look at their goals.

1. Are their goals to employ a diverse population?  Then be sure your career center, job site and HR processes are accessible.
2. Is your goal to do business with the Federal Government?  Then start by making your products and website accessible and 508 compliant.
3. If your goal is for Americans to believe your firm is socially conscious than create an inclusion program with marketing programs that include people with disabilities in your advertising, social media outreach and other communications.

Where you start all depends on your goals and that is why I create a road map for my clients to help them prioritize, reduce their risk and create a step by step plan that has tasks, timelines and deliverables.

Question 4: Debra, Thank you so much for taking the time to inform our readers about 508 Compliance and the important role it plays! Please take a moment to tell us about your new venture and what we should expect in the near future.

Answer:  Ruh Global is a Strategic Marketing firm that allows organizations to connect and integrate the community of PwD and their families.  Our services will enable corporate and public organizations to easily navigate the legal maze and confusing messages about and from the community of PwD.

Our goal is enable business success through innovative marketing and communications programs that are:

• Strategically and creatively aligned with corporate goals
• Seamlessly integrated across traditional and digital mediums
• Tailored to the specific needs of each client
• Scalable with measurable results
• Delivers integration of messaging for all customers, not separate but equal opportunities for different diversity groups

People with disabilities (PwD) represent a very large demographic group that is underserved within typical marketing and communications programs.  Ruh Global can help adjust those plans already underway or help to develop new plans that fully integrate this community into the messaging to create universal customer experience and the best overall business value for their marketing and communications investments.

I will still be active in the ICT Accessibility field because it is critical component to the success of including people with disabilities in every aspect of society especially in meaningful and marketable employment.

Thank you again Debra for your time! Stay tuned for our next post about Section 508 Compliance!!

During the 2010 United States Census, there were a total of 17,320,856 Asian Americans. This made Asian Americans 5.6 percent of the total American population. How about Black Americans?  They make up 12.6% of the total population.  So if you combined these two races you would come close to the number of Disabled Americans.

Just think if we built barriers that would not allow Asian Americans like me or Black Americans to fully utilize or leverage information technology.  Not only would it be considered a highly inflammatory discriminatory issue, the contribution to society and information technology itself would suffer a great loss.  Yet we continue to do just that with Disabled Americans.

What is being done?

Due to this growing problem all types of laws have been passed to address this issue.  Today I will discuss Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act.

In 1998, Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 to require Federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology (EIT) accessible to people with disabilities. Inaccessible technology interferes with an ability to obtain and use information quickly and easily. Section 508 was enacted to eliminate barriers in information technology, open new opportunities for people with disabilities, and encourage development of technologies that will help achieve these goals. The law applies to all Federal agencies when they develop, procure, maintain, or use electronic and information technology. Under Section 508 (29 U.S.C. ‘794 d), agencies must give disabled employees and members of the public access to information that is comparable to access available to others.

This law has been the standard for all federal agencies and the good news is that most all federal agencies have been working towards compliance.  The gap has been in the private sector companies who contract with the government to provide IT services.  That gap is now being enforced as the Office of Management and Budget sent its fourth memo in eight years telling agencies to be aware of and include Section 508 requirements in technology and acquisitions. The difference this time is OMB included a strategic plan with deadlines for agencies to meet.  The DoJ survey and other meetings found “agency Section 508 programs vary widely in maturity, with the primary challenges focused in three areas: understanding and applying standards; defining and measuring program success; and developing the workforce.”

To address those challenges, OMB laid out 11 goals for agencies:

1. The General Services Administration will develop a plan to improve the Section508.gov portal to be a “one-stop shop” for information.
2. Agencies will include an accessibility statement on all inter- and intranet websites.
3. By March 24, each agency CIO shall give GSA the name of their Section 508 coordinator, and when a new coordinator is named, the agency CIO has 90 days to update GSA on the change.
4. By March 1, the CIO Council’s Accessibility Committee will develop a standard governmentwide template for agencies to report baseline compliance of key measures for websites and procurements.
5. The committee will create a template for agencies to do a baseline assessment of their 508 programs. The committee then will use the baseline to identify high-risk areas or common areas of needs across the government.
6. Assessments are due from each agency by Dec. 31.
7. Starting in third quarter of fiscal 2014, agencies tell OMB how they are improving their baseline 508 assessments.
8. By June, GSA will update the reference manual for Section 508 coordinators to help them improve their job skills.
9. By June, GSA will share with the CIO and CAO councils plans to improve buyaccessible.gov, and to increase its awareness across the government.
10. By October, GSA will update 508 learning courses for acquisition workers.
11. GSA and the Access Board will collaborate on the best way to get the word out about the new 508 standards once they are finalized

“A comprehensive approach to managing Section 508 along the full IT and acquisition lifecycles of an investment requires a long-term, consistent approach,” the memo stated. “The steps identified in this strategic plan … are the first steps to improving management of Section 508.”

In case you are interested, CLICK HERE to see the official memo

So who will this affect the most in short term?

1. People who want to do business with the government will need to acquire the skill sets to address section 508
2. Developers who want to work with the government will need training.
3. Federal CIO’s will need to become more active in oversight.

More helpful Links:

• Section508.gov  http://section508.gov
• WC3 Policies Relating to Web Accessibility for USA  http://www.w3.org/WAI/Policy/#US
• U.S. Access Board  http://www.access-board.gov/508.htm
• Standards and Harmonization  http://section508.gov/index.cfm?fuseAction=Standards_Harmonization
• Accessibility, Law and Target.com  http://jimthatcher.com/law-target.htm

For more information on Section 508 concerning checklists, remediation and monitoring tools, training, etc.  Feel free to email me at doug.loo@Armedia.com or comment on the post so I can share the information.

The population of disabled Americans has done just that.  Our aging population and being at war coupled with advances in healthcare have all contributed to Americans with Disabilities becoming the fastest growing minority in the United States.

Let’s take a look at the numbers:

From the latest census report About 1 IN 5 AMERICANS HAVE some kind of disability and, with the population aging and the likelihood of having a disability increasing with age, the growth in the number of people with disabilities can be expected to accelerate in the coming decades.

  See Source Here

Disability is no respecter of age, sex or race. Even among children ages 6 to 14, for instance, about 5% had some type of disability. Nevertheless, the likelihood of having a disability increases with age— almost 40% of seniors 65 years old and older have a disability

So some 20% of our population has reported a disability, that’s well over 50 million people and of those people 36% and 29% ages 15 to 64 with a severe disability who use a computer and the Internet at home, respectively.

From there you could add people who have a disability but do not care to report like people color blindness.  Roughly 8% of men and 0.5% of women are affected. Therefore chances that your neighbor or one of your classmates is colorblind are very high.

So something as simple as a web form instructing you to push the green button for yes and the red button for no is what I consider an IT Barrier to equal access.  Perhaps if you were colorblind and the form was on your banking site and it was concerning a fee approval you agree.

For more extensive visual disability like blindness I ask that you turn your monitor off and try to navigate your computer and complete a simple task.  In coming articles I intend to provide you examples of simple errors made across multiple file types so you can become more aware of your responsibility to stop building barriers to Information.

Next week I will discuss some of the current Laws, who they apply to, and what you can do to comply.

This presentation focused on illustrating how Alfresco and other open source technologies can be leveraged for government agencies.

To prove my point, I decided to run a query that returned a known result set from a variety of clients, while changing the settings of dfc.search.max_results and dfc.search.max_results_per_source. To set these properties, I added the following lines to the dfc.properties file on both the Content Server and the DA web application server. I set these properties artificially low to make the results obvious.

dfc.search.max_results = 100
dfc.search.max_results_per_source = 10

The query I ran was select r_object_id from dm_folder. In my repository, this query returned 743 rows (from iDQL, which I used as my baseline). I also ran this query from the RepoInt utility, the DA DQL Editor and the DA Advanced Search page. If there was any truth to the claims of my colleagues, I should see a result set no larger than 100 rows when the properties were in effect. See the table below for the results.

Interestingly, the Advanced Search did truncate the result set, but not as I expected. It truncated the result set to 350 when these properties were not explicitly set, leading me to believe there was some sort of default in play. It also truncated the result set to 10, not 100, when the properties were set. What’s going on here?

After reading up a bit on dfc.search.max_results and dfc.search.max_results_per_source properties, I concluded that these configuration settings only affect ECIS/FS2 searches and not “regular” client searches (i.e., iDQL, RepoInt, DQL Editor, etc.). However, since Webtop (and DA) are configured to use ECIS/FS2 when they are installed, it appears that the Advanced Search does respect the dfc.search.max_results and dfc.search.max_results_per_source properties when they are set. Here’s how it works:

The dfc.search.max_results property dictates how large the final result set can be. The default value is 1,000. In my testing, this was supposed to be 100 rows. However, this setting is the maximum setting for the entire result set and is further constrained by the dfc.search.max_results_per_source property.

The dfc.search.max_results_per_source property dictates the maximum number of results that can be returned from a single source. The default value is 350. Since my testing only involved one repository, the maximum number of results returned was 10. If I had searched across 2 repositories, the final result set would have contained 20 rows (max). Following this logic, if I had searched across 20 repositories, the result would have been 100 (the maximum size allows by the dfc.search.max_results property), not 200 as expected.

My advice is if you are only searching on one repository, set the dfc.search.max_results and dfc.search.max_results_per_source properties equal to each other to ensure your Advanced Searches return maximum result sets. What the actual value of these properties are to produce maximum performance and efficiency is up to you to determine.

So, my colleagues and I were both right, we just needed to specify how we were running our queries.

This blog was originally posted at msroth.wordpress.com on Juy 5, 2010.

Documentum uses several objects to hold persistence information about content; we will use five of them to determine where the content for an object with r_object_id = '0900000180023d07' resides: dmr_content, dm_format, dm_filestore, dm_docbase_config, and dm_location. The following query will get us all the information we need to assemble the path to the object’s content.

select data_ticket, dos_extension, file_system_path, r_docbase_id from dmr_content c, dm_format f, dm_filestore fs, dm_location l, dm_docbase_config dc where any c.parent_id = '0900000180023d07' and f.r_object_id = c.format and fs.r_object_id = c.storage_id and l.object_name = fs.root

Result:

• data_ticket = -2147474649
• dos_extension = txt
• file_system_path = C:/Documentum/data/docbase/content_storage_01
• r_docbase_id = 123

The trick to determining the path to the content is in decoding the data_ticket's 2′s complement decimal value. Convert the data_ticket to a 2′s compliment hexidecimal number by first adding 2^32 to the number and then converting it to hex. You can use a scientific calculator to do this or grab some Java code off the net.

• -2147474649 + 2^32 = (-2147474649 + 4294967296) = 2147492647
• converting 2147492647 to hex = 80002327

Now, split the hex value of the data_ticket at every two characters, append it to file_system_path and docbase_id (padded to 8 digits), and add the dos_extension. Viola! you have the complete path to the content file.

C:/Documentum/data/docbase/content_storage_01/00000123/80/00/23/27.txt

I think this is a really clever way to manage the creation and assignment of directories and filenames, don’t you? In addition, this scheme guarantees that there is never more than 256 files in a single directory, increasing optimization.

You can do it in reverse also. Say you have file with this path: /80/20/23.txt. What is its r_object_id?

• converting 80002023 to decimal = 2147491875
• subtract 2^32: 2147491875 – 4294967296 = -2147475421
• select r_object_id, object_name from dm_sysobject, s dmr_content c where any c.parent_id = s.r_object_id and c.data_ticket = -2147475421.0

Note: You must append “.0″ to the data_ticket value to force DQL to process the variable as a floating point number, otherwise you get an integer overflow error.

Of course, you can always use the GET_FILE administrative method to find an object’s content’s file path. Just remember, that the content ID it is asking for is the r_object_id for the dmr_content object.

This blog was originally posted at msroth.wordpress.com on Sept 9, 2011.