Inside Documentum

Content Server 6 Release Notes

The release notes for Documentum 6 Content Server have just been released (!?!) on PowerLink. D6 is going to be a huge change, comparable with the moves from 3 to 4 or 4 to 5. Here are some interesting snippets from the release notes:

In new repositories, all date values are stored as UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) format. Repositories upgraded from prior releases continue to store date values in server local time. This could be an interesting gotcha if you trying to reproduce behaviour from an upgraded repository in a newly created repository. In fact there is a whole section in the release notes (in Limitations section, ‘Client applications accessing Content Server located in a different time zone’) about the semantics of reading/writing date and time attributes with D5 and D6 clients. You should definitely read this section to ensure you don’t get tripped up. I can forsee many forum questions on this subject.

Documentum 6 introduces major enhancements for supporting distributed configurations. Certain configurations that previously supported only read operations now support write operations as well. Accelerated Content Server (ACS) and Branch Office Caching Server (BOCS) now get the long awaited write support (in D5 BOCS only supported read-caching). Interestingly ACS is said to support both synchronous and asynchronous writing. Synchronous will write the content back to the content server immediately. Asynchronous requires the support of yet another new component Documentum Messaging Server (DMS). I haven’t seen any details yet but once I have I’ll try and put together a piece on how these components all fit together and suggest some strategies for their use.

An improvement in this release notes is the Content Server OS/Database version requirements section. This is now a matrix (OS v DB) rather than a flat listing.