BOFH: Lost licences

They are right about KM databases though

This business about making them difficult to access is so right! Proprietry "extensions" to SQL - clever pointers - proprietry APIs... The whole ECMS/KM industry is a mess.

Bureaucrats have another reason not to supply information!!

This is why we're brewing our own

Our entire competitive advantage comes from our internal processes, but we've reached the physical capacity of doing it the "old fashioned way" and as such have to roll it all into an information system.

Naturally, we could hire someone else to do it or buy some product or get some SAP consultants, but we feel that in the end, that would tend to conform our processes to fit the system, rather than the system to fit our processes, so we've enlisted a few programmers and two of our officers with experience in systems design (they were consultants before joining our venture) have taken the lead positions. The system stands to be a completely integrated package joining together a content management system, financial system, call center system, inventory management, warehouse and supply chain management, order and customer management, communications management, and literally every other corner of our processes and needs with a ridiculous amount of flexibility for change while still enforcing completeness (since our various sites do things differently and indeed processes change dynamically on a customer-basis)

The CMS posed a very imposing problem. We didn't REALLY need to build our own, but the vendors we talked to and looked at were all sharks. Even open source solutions were shady and seemed untrustworthy. So, that part of the project sat dormant until one of the project managers, sipping a coffee at a meeting, said "Why don't we just make a database table with a couple columns - an identifier, some description columns, and a freakin' binary field" - and thus our CMS was born. It's elegant in its simplicity - documents related to other objects in the database are referenced FROM those objects rather than from the content (after all, how often do you start an inquiry into a customer transaction with an image of the receipt and then backtrace to the initial order placment?). Documents that stand alone are described sufficiently to be locateable in the description fields.

The only real technical challenge in making the perfect CMS for our needs was distributing that particular table off the main database servers - which consisted of a great, big, RTFM.

YMMV, do not attempt to duplicate this course of action without proper consultation and investigation into alternatives.

Far too obvious

The BOFH has the originals in the safe???

C'mon, he would NEVER have done that in the old days...he'd have sold them on the black market, sabotaged the CM server, then blackmailed the PHB to buy more from a supplier where he was guaranteed to get a backhander.

And what's with the feeble revenge from last time? His rival is still alive???? WTF?

He's going soft!