Its always interesting when a company as big as Microsoft makes it way into a new niche and the leader in that domain accommodates to co-exist. Make no mistake, its a strategic move from both sides but the challenge is to help our customers strategize ECM solutions keeping long-term in mind. This is my $0.02 to understand where we are heading and how to plan for it.
I had experienced various interesting encounters with EMC support, but lately, I feel like they are just getting arrogant… I guess it comes with the size (Documentum to EMC) and its layers. Here are some to ponder…
Read the rest of this entry »
BOF is critical in getting business logic and processes implemented accurately *enterprise* wide. And its capabilities play significant role with development, deployments and migrations. First of all, I have to be honest and say how much I adore the BO framework in Documentum. When the first version came out, I loved it and loved the control it offered. And soon realized how the BO functionality wasn’t being invoked on machines where BO registration wasn’t done. And it was taken care of in 2.0, but it was not recommended to use dbor.prop although it was backward compatible. This intangible setup on a machine (using 2.0), leaves you hanging when things do not work. And the fact that individual interfaces/implementations for each business object need to be deployed OR define the same jar over and over for each business object if you decide to club all together - not perfect yet…
Read the rest of this entry »
Documentum’s BPM is one of those technologies which business can’t wait to implement. The evolution from the Workflow Manager to this is quite remarkable. And, in all fairness, I should also say that its gotten quite temperamental over time, rightly so, at the rate at which the features are being added in.
Read the rest of this entry »
I was recently asked by a technologist on how to go about adding a new active directory sync which is not supported by Documentum. As I was thinking through it, I remembered that James McGovern had posed this question in the past - Why does Documentum need its own user store when it can use other systems which are developed solely for this purpose?
Read the rest of this entry »
The success of a production deployment can be analyzed with the amount of support which goes into maintaining and/or trouble-shooting the application. One of the challenges in a production release tends to do with the workflows. Several times in the past, I had to run variety of queries to identify various combination of results relating to workflows. In the process I developed this cheat sheet for myself which gives a quick overview of the workflows and what you have to query for.
The most important aspect of integrating two systems is to assure that there is a solid hand-shake and that the communication is accurately handled. Consider this transaction between Input Accel & Documentum:
Export Module> Request is made to create an object type for document
Content Server> returns Object id
Export Module> Set attributes for document
– network error –
This past few weeks we have been trying to interview and place a technical consultant for our project and it turned out to be quite a challenge. I had my share of unique experiences and here are some:
For those who hadn’t had a chance to review Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management, 2007 from Gartner Inc., would be interested to know that IBM is positioned as the Leader for its ability to execute and completeness of vision. EMC is immediately following it and according to Mark Lewis, President, Content Management and Archiving Division at EMC, launch of Documentum 6 Platform and recent acquisition of X-Hive Corporation, supports organization’s in place vision and strategy. Unless IBM makes any major releases or strategic moves, EMC might very well be in the leading position next year. OpenText and Oracle are also positioned in the Leader’s quadrant.
Here are some hot new features in D6. Please feel free to share if you know more
ACS/BOCS:
