Here’s a gift for Documentum newbies on the benefits of the EMC Support Forums:

EMC Support Forums Video

Happy New Year’s as well.

As promised, here’s the pic of Great Documentum Developer Get Together of 2008 at Momentum Prague 2008:

Great Documentum Developer Get Together

From left to right: Erin Riley, Robin East, Ingo Zitzmann, Jørg Krause, Hans Harald Wennersgård, and myself.  It was great meeting everyone in person and I hope the group can reconvene at Athens for Momentum 2009.

I just got back from Prague and I must say – I missed the days of Momentum. EMC World is too large and the majority of the sessions focus on EMC hardware, not Documentum. Most of the Momentum sessions were very similar to what was presented back in July at EMC World 2008. However, there were significantly more sessions presented by customers and users. Even though product/architecture sessions were informative, the customer led sessions provided a lot of best practices and real-world application of Documentum technology.

Here are some of my observations from the conference. I’m not going to go into too much detail, since you can find detailed blog postings about the various session from the Documentum blogger community.

1. CentreStage – not only is this the much hyped new offering from Documentum, the development/customization of the other major products (eg Media Workspace, Taskspace, Process Builder, etc) will include various components from CentreStage. Not sure what this means to WDK, but all of the new CentreStage components will be built on DFS and Web 2.0 technology.
2. Long gone are the days of Documentum creating a base product and providing a common toolset (eg WDK) that developers can use to address customers business requirements. All of the major products will be releasing with a “solution framework”, which will be comprised on object types, UI components, and business processes that are based on industry best practices. The solution framework is intended to kick-start development and support the deployment of a solution much more quickly than today’s standards. Also, since EMC Documentum is providing the solution framework, they can greatly enhance the interoperability between the various product lines beyond the core features.
3. Virtualization – With the release of Federated Records Service (FRS) 6.5, which supports the records and retention management on non-Documentum repositories, this marks the “second entry” into virtual repositories. I consider Enterprise Content Integration Service (ECIS) as the “first entry” into this space. FRS uses the same strategy of creating a common framework and SDK to support the features from Documentum perspective and allow partners to develop adaptors for other content sources (eg Sharepoint, Notes, SAP, etc). I see FRS as the stepping stone to full virtualization of content management functionality for external data sources.
4. With FAST being acquired by Microsoft, there has been a lot of talk on what will happen with the FAST search engine that is currently OEM with Content Server. Well, it seems that Lucene, which FAST also uses, will be the core of the how content is indexed with Documentum. However, the core search engine is going to built by EMC. I’m guessing this is to compete with Google’s entry into ECM space with its own adaptors to Documentum repositories. Since the core of any search engine is the search algorithm and/or technology it uses, I’m not going to reveal anything that is proprietary. I will say the architecture for this new search engine is quite REVOLUTIONARY.

During the week, I was also able to finally meet up with some of long-time players of Powerlink. Erin Riley and myself met up with Jørg Krause, Robin East, and Ingo Zitzmann over a few beers. We also met a few other Documentum consultants from TietoEnator who were very knowledgeable and fun to hang out with. It was a blast getting to know everyone and I hope to meet them again very soon.

Pictures of the “gathering” will be coming soon.

I’m hoping to finally meet Jørg in person at Prague.  If anyone is interested in meeting us, let me know.  Beach Street Consulting is hosting a party Tues night at 10PM at a bar/club right by the Charles Bridge.  We will be heading there directly from the Castle and that we are planning to provide transportation back to the hotels afterwards.

BTW – I know its been months since I’ve posted.  I have been working on a major project for a large government agency since this summer.  The complexities and sheer number of documents that the system has to handle has been mind-blowing.  I am planning to share my lessons learn once the system is released at the end of the year.

In the mean time, I’m taking a break in hopes to finally meet some of the other DCTM dinosaurs from the other side of the Atlantic

I came across a blog entry on BrilliantLeap’s about “Documentum Documentation Uncovered” today.  I remember seeing something about this through my EMC Developer Network email updates, but since I already have access to the documentation, I didnt think much of it.  When I clicked on the link to the page to see what’s available, I was sorely disappointed.  The EMC evaluation software (and I presume documentation) that was available centered around the storage products (ie not true Documentum software like Content Server or Webtop).

One could say that this is the first step in the right direction, but my feelings is that this is just a marketing ploy to satisfy the development community continual requests for making more information public.  EMC/Documentum has always kept their documentation/support very close to home.  This pretty much forces clients pay their yearly support/maintenance fee in order to get access to Support Forums and/or software/documentation updates.  I understand this model from a business perspective, but the reality is that if EMC wants to compete against Microsoft or open-source community, EMC has to become more open from a development platform perspective.  This means making the core of the Documentum documentation available to the public.  This last statement is for Alan Z and the EDN to ensure that the first step is not the last step.  Keep up the good work!