On the big 7-0

I turned 70 last month.  I remain bound and determined to not let it change my perspective or direction.  I signed up to receive Social Security and continued playing golf.  Cynthia arranged a nice birthday party for me at the new house.  What have I learned?

I really am retired.  I spent the last year avoiding being hired as a consultant, which is not difficult.  My supporting infrastructure at Gimmal, particularly Brad Teed and my friends in the industry enabled me to continue in my “synthesist” role.  Without that infrastructure, my expertise is fading away.  This is not a bad thing. 

The things that used to be so important don’t matter as much anymore.  I was always in a hurry, avoiding any down time.  Now, I am much more patient, biding my time.  In search of a project worth committing to.  Still, I look at my email compulsively, always expecting an email to arrive that is really addressed to me.  Old habits die hard and slowly. 

I am committed to building a golf game.  When my dad was in his 60’s and 70’s, he worked constantly toward shooting his age.  I thought it was a crazy idea, because you can’t do it until you are at least 76, and what do you do next.  Now, I am committed to shooting my age at Champions.  I have become my father. 

We bought a big house on the Champions Golf Course that we are redoing after reducing the inside to studs and cement.  This will be the first neighborhood I have lived in since Wroxton in the 90’s.  I am mainly looking forward to it, especially the neighbors part.  (Note that after 50 years, I am leaving the Rice neighborhood.) 

I bought season tickets for 21/22 to Manchester United.  Makes no economic sense, but I want to go to a season of games.  I am looking forward to seeing more of Ken and Grayson in Manchester. 

Hope springs eternal.  I am looking forward to more great adventures.  We have plans in the next year that include the beach in Greece, soccer in Manchester, skiing in Breckenridge, plays on Broadway and London, whale watching at Friday Harbor, and many, many concerts. I hope to connect with y’all along the way.

Mike Alsup

Covid-19

I have been working from home for years with my wife, Cynthia. We share an office, so the at home and working part isn’t weird. I use a big monitor, and have a great camera arriving this week to upgrade my Teams/Zoom game. I have been having online meetings and collaborating online for years with a variety of tools. Cynthia’s company was acquired in January (yaay), and she has more responsibility, not less, but they meet on-line all day every day. We have upped our game for wine and food prepared at home (mainly Cynthia). We are up to date on our Netflix, Disney+, Amazon, Hulu and HBONow projects.

What is weird is the not at home part. The grocery stores are dystopian. I feel like I am in Children of Men, or World War Z. I am playing golf 3 days per week at Champions. Texas is one of those states that lets people play golf, and the commute time is half of what it was. I feel vaguely guilty about this.

The thing I feel most guilty about is the not sacrificing part. I am generally retired, so my employment is not threatened. I live right beside the world’s best medical center. I see what the grocery and health care people are going through and I feel so badly for them. Many of them are young, so the probabilities are more in their favor than they are for a 69 year old male, but still. I will find a good way to help finance the recovery.

I am wearing gloves and a mask when I leave the house and washing hands when I return. I hope that the country has the time to flatten the curve. For me, this means keeping infections low until better drugs, like the new Gilead drug, get worked through the system and can save people who show up at the emergency room. I hate the reality series politics of it.

I think I will get Covid if I haven’t already, and hope my number isn’t snake eyes. I have had a great run. Will keep you posted.

Alsup LLC

Following a great run at Gimmal, I am an independent consultant, specializing in strategic projects for large organizations and vendors related to enterprise content management, records management, and the enterprise implementation of Office 365 for information governance.

Content Governance in Office 365

I presented this to an industry group in June.

Presentation 0628-2019

10 Years After

Today is my 10th anniversary of this blog. What did I learn with it?

1. Having a great domain name is cool, but it doesn’t really do anything. No one is looking for blogs anymore, generally, because
2. Almost all personal blogs are on Facebook, which is better for history, photos, and friends. Still,
3. It is great for forcing you to organize your thoughts. I was in better touch with a variety of things for having a blog.
4. It is fun for personal branding, which I never cared that much about other than the fun part.
5. It is a record of articles I wrote elsewhere even after those publications and sites crater.
6. Here is to the next ten years…

iPhone suggestions

This article had many useful insights that changed how I use my iPhone. In particular, there is an Accessibility setting that makes it easy to get bigger text so that you don’t need glasses to read everything. Happy New Year

Recent Post on Content Types and Retention Labels

Here and here are a two part article I wrote in CMSWire on Content Types and Retention Labels. In all of my articles over the years, I have relied heavily on the expertise of Brad Teed, and will miss working with him.

New Gartner ECM Magic Quadrant

Here is the new Gartner ECM Magic Quadrant. Most of the leaders are in familiar places. Microsoft leads all in ability to execute and Box is newly on the chart.

Events in Office 365

Microsoft announced their Event framework for Advanced Data Governance (ADG) this week. Gimmal has been working with them on this capability for the last year, and we believe it adds significant capability to their cloud based governance. Here is a link to a presentation we made with them last year that illustrates a common scenario. An employee is terminated in an organization that uses SAP as its ERP system, Office 365 for document management, and Advanced Data Governance for content governance for Office 365 workloads. When the employee is terminated in SAP HR, all of the documents in SAP related to that user are made final and started through a disposition lifecycle according to organizational policy. This is all made possible through the recently announced ADG event framework from Microsoft.

(our demonstration starts at minute 58:00 of Nishan’s session)

Here is more information about this solution:

https://www.gimmal.com/document-management-for-sap/

Thanks to Tyson Foods and KnowledgeLake

Charles Norman II of Tyson Foods presented a webinar last week that illustrated the value that Microsoft, KnowledgeLake and Gimmal (ERP-Link) added to their enterprise replacement of Documentum. Gimmal thanks our great partners.