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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…
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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.
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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?
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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.

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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 –

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Here are some hot new features in D6. Please feel free to share if you know more
ACS/BOCS:

• ACS/BOCS server can write content to a repository, either synchronously or asynchronously. Writing content synchronously ensures that all users at all network locations have immediate access to the content. Writing content asynchronously improves the performance of import and check-in operations, because remote users do not need to wait for the content to be uploaded to the central site. And Content can be pre-cached on BOCS servers using new BOCS caching jobs.
• DA can be used to gather key statistics about cache requests and monitor status of the ACS and BOCS servers

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ETL, Extract, Transfer & Load, tools are essential for customers implementing Content Management solutions. Although initial implementation tends to focus on generating new content, the solution inevitably ends up having to migrate their legacy content. The most popular, out of the shelf, ETL solution available in the market for Documentum migration today is Crown Partner’s Buldoser.

Now, do you really need to buy the product for this purpose?
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More often than not, the bugs (uncritical) encountered by QA are retained in the product, than push the release date. Seldom, its also the case that QA doesn’t account for certain test cases trying to keep up with the ever growing features of the product. Here are some annoying little details that I ran into in the last couple weeks alone, with Documentum suite of products
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Often times it becomes necessary to know which Docbases a Docbroker is aware of. One of the typical scenario’s that this becomes necesssary is when you are at a client’s site and the connection to docbase is not happening and you need to be doubly sure that the docbroker is not just up, but it knows of the docbase you want to connect to. And ofcourse, if you need any health check scripts, this comes handy.

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Anybody who worked with Documentum’s DTS know that it comes with variety of issues. One of the challenging ones I had to face was to do with performance. Here are some pointers that I learnt from this process:

DTS is multi-threaded:

Its exciting to know that DTS is multi-threaded and that it can take advantage of a dual CPU Servers. But listen to this – threading is limited by the plug-in and/or application being used to perform the transformation. If there are 2 documents being processed by DTS and they both use the same plug-in or application, then the processing is *serial*. If they use different plug-ins and applications, then the processing is concurrent. With MS format documents dominating in numbers in most organizations, multi-threading is not truly used.

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