Stumble It!You’ve asked for it, so here is a short-list of the differences between Sharepoint and Documentum:
- Sharepoint 2007 is tightly integrated with Office 2007. Documentum has some light integration with Office through Webtop Application Connectors. Documentum has stronger integration with other authoring applications including Dreamweaver, QuarkXPress, and Adobe InDesign.
- Sharepoint provides various mechanisms to access and modify content when offline (eg Outlook, Access, etc). Documentum only supports offline editing if you install Documentum Desktop application.
- Sharepoint 2007 supports rights management with Office 2007 natively. Documentum requires you to install Information Rights Manager to have this feature.
- Both Documentum and Sharepoint provide the ability to create custom object types. However, Sharepoint’s object model does not seem to support object inheritance.
- Lifecycle features (eg applying actions, defining entry criteria, applying lifecycle to multiple documents, etc) is more extensive in Documentum than in Sharepoint.
- Documentum security model is more extensive than Sharepoint. Documentum has extended permissions that allow users to perform specific functions (eg change ownership, change state, change permissions, etc).
- All objects in Documentum are secured using the security model. In Sharepoint only certain objects can be secured (eg web site, list, folders, documents, etc).
- Content can be only published to Sharepoint site; however, if content needs to publish outside of MOSS repository, this requires custom coding. Content can be published to any website using Documentum Site Caching and Site Delivery Services. Documentum also has portlets for various portal vendors that allow those portals to access content that is stored in Documentum repository.
Please feel free to comment on any other feature differences.
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From what I’ve seen of MOSS I think that you’re provided a pretty fair comparison. MOSS is trying to be more than a pure collaboration tool but I don’t think that its quite there yet. Having said that it obviously does enough for most customers – I am guessing that it will sell as many licenses as all of the competing ECM vendors.
Have you had a look at Alfresco yet? If not, I would suggest downloading it. I think that you will be impressed with its performance, functionality and flexibility when compared to Documentum.
PS
Keep up the good work on the PowerLink (awful redesign btw) forums!
Hi markdav,
I have not had a chance to look at Alfresco yet, but its on my plate for this summer. Thanks for the words of encouragement.
[...] Johnny has a list of eight differences between the products. The key differences are not competitive though. For example Sharepoint [...]
SharePoint does not provide native capabilities of managing e.g.:
- Compound documents
- XML content (chunking, validation, transformation etc)
- Rich Media such as automatic transformation of high-resolution video or images to lower , web-ready resolutions.
That’s a great post. You have put in some interesting comparison of Documentum and SharePoint, but considering that the post is around two years old, can you confirm whether these differences are bridged or they still exist.
Regarding the Point No 7:
In Documentum only the objects of types inherited from dm_sysobject can use ACL. I suppose there is not much security for the objects that have their types’ supertype as null.
As I am totally zero in SharePoint, it would be great if you can put some more light on the difference in the security aspect of both.