Before I dive into the conference, I want to first acknowledge that I have not been blogging for quite some time. Some of this has to do with work-life balance of family, the other is that the technology has not really excited me that much to spend time writing a blog. Its much simpler to “tweet” an interesting article or make a comment about reading something interesting. A blog entry requires time to think whats important to you and more importantly, what you want to share with others. Its been a long time since I had opportunity to go to DevCon and meet engineers and product managers of IIG group. Coming out of this conference, there’s a certain excitement that is starting to brew on what’s coming down the path and how product today (and tomorrow) is going to impact the future strategy of EMC Documentum.
So how is EMC achieving harmonization? Here are some key examples:
1) xCP 2.1 (coming out next yr) will allow xCP 2.x applications to co-exist with xCP 1.x apps as well as non-xcp apps (including WDK based apps). Ideally, this would have been part of 2.0 release, but given that 2.0 was a major code release (from 1.x), I understood the need to push the inter-operability to 2.1.
2) When xCP 2.2 comes out (timeline unknown), it will be inter-operable with D2 4.x apps. The infrastructure to support this will be included in 2.1, but the actual implementation will have to wait to 2.2, since EMC is trying to incorporate some of the real-time configuration capabilities in D2 into xCP. We will start seeing the D2/xCP sooner. There are plans to incorporate some of the xCP reporting UIs into D2 (possibly D2 v4.3).
3) Syncplicity Connector to Documentum will support bi-directional review and review. No longer are we limited to just “pushing” content out of Documentum to Syncplicity. Users can make updates to the documents stored in their Syncplicity folder and the documents will be sync’d to Documentum repository.
4) Syncplicity today supports both off premise storage hosting (ie Syncplicity servers) as well as on-premise storage via Isilon storage. EMC plans to expand storage capabilities of Syncplicity to allow admins to select their on-premise medium of choice via EMC ViPR technology.
5) Captiva 7.1 has mobile toolkit that will allow developers to build image enhancement solutions on both iOS and android platforms.
6) Finally, we know that EMC knows private cloud. We have heard them talk about hybrid cloud. At DevCon, it was the first time I heard of EMC working towards public cloud. Specifically, IIG is building a public solutions on NGIS using xCP Designer. These solutions will be truly multi-tenant and scalable across the globe with multiple data centers. These solutions will be focus on collaboration that are vertically focused with built-in integrations.
I am very excited that multiple products are maturing to the point where product roadmap is leading to a point of unification and harmony between all the products. This is not going to happen over night, but I feel the future is bright.
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Ask Johnny! - Documentum Guru 