Momentum 2008 Update

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.

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.
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.
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.
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.