Assisting project teams and customers to optimize their use of the xPression suite. Leveraging features, issue resolution, tool development using java, C#, XQuery, performance, etc.

Following the acquisition of Document Sciences by EMC, I worked to increase the quality and feature set of the xPression product line, and aggressively expand its capabilities in the area of web services and external connections of all sorts.I also performed triage on difficult customer issues, where the point of failure was not initially clear, directing them to the right engineer or resolving them myself.I worked with our server (J2EE-Eclipse) and client (C#-Visual Studio) environments about equally.

The acquisition of Data Retrieval by Document Sciences caused us to focus on a single application, rule-based document generation, which (along with our text repositories) came to be known as DLS (Document Library Services).As time went on, we realized that (1) we were no longer in the database business and (2) neither of our server code bases (z/OS and Windows) was robust enough to take multi-platform. There was nowhere to go with it, but to start over. The result was the xPression product suite.This project was a total makeover. We replaced homegrown components with standard ones, notably J2EE and SQL. What we gained was portability, scalability, and (from the IT viewpoint) respectability. Today the xPression suite is used in a couple of hundred large companies.

Data Retrieval started out serving state legislatures, providing document automation, text search, and publishing software, using mainframes and assembler language.Soon after joining DR, I noticed that we were writing very similar custom code for different customers, and on my own, I developed a scripting language, ALF, optimized for text manipulation, and at the same time abstracted the key actions into callable pieces. This brought customization under control, and evolved into something even better: a basis for creating terminal-base apps, and a language for writing services, once we evolved into client/server.I led a re-write of the mainframe system into PL/I, targeting CICS and afterwards VAX VMS. This resulted in a powerful and extensible product (TextDBMS), with a carefully layered design.We were early adopters of the PC. Our first application was simple file exchange through terminal emulation. We built filters between certain word processor formats and our own SGML text. I led the development of a client/server architecture, and wrote the MVS server and OS/2 and Mac clients. Out of this work came new Windows client/server applications, written in VB.DR struggled to find new customers outside government. We positioned our server offerings as a text database system and development tools. As tools are difficult to sell, we developed applications ourselves, which helped us win a market in insurance, primarily through a document assembly app, which was developed in cooperation with a few customers.By this time we had opted out of the publishing software business, and begun to partner with Document Sciences for this piece (CompuSet). The assembly apps were of interest to them, as they provided a great way to design and generate published documents based on data. Eventually, Document Sciences purchased DR, and I gladly signed up with them.