Inside Documentum

Chalk Talks, Great Idea

2 of the most noticeable features of last year’s Momentum were the focus on Case Management/xCP Platform and a greater emphasis on ‘execution’. Whilst you can find out about the first feature on EMCs own channels I’ll expand a bit on the ‘execution’.

EMC Documentum like so many other vendors has been pretty good at the ‘Big Things’ such as great new features, new platforms, incorporating new products and so on. But what’s more important to those of us who actually have to convince people to buy, install, run, support and maintain Documentum system is the ‘little things’. Little things like accurate and comprehensive documentation, Sample apps, and applications that are free of bugs.

It was apparent from a number of seminars at Momentum that all these ‘little things’ are being given greater emphasis in the CMA division. xCP itself is an outcome from such thinking. Previously we had a number of disparate products that were individually licensed (Process Engine, Task Space, Forms Builder and so on) and it wasn’t always clear how they should be combined to produce a usable application nor how much it would cost to licence.

With xCP we should get a more rationalised licence cost but even more importantly a platform that is focussed on a particular application paradigm, Case Management. As part of xCP there is a sample application, Grants Management, that allows you to easily get up to speed with xCP and play around with it. There is also a focus within the xCP product management team to provide some ‘jump start’ features such as a focus on use cases and making the product focus on particular Case Management categories. There is a lot of concentration on best practices and making it easy to understand the best way of fitting the vast feature set together.

In this Chalk Talk both of these good things are in evidence. It’s a short video snippet that shows how to use a particular feature of Forms Builder. It’s a great way of getting across a simple but regularly needed feature that has a few gotchas if you are trying to do this the first time on your own. Best thing is you can immediately try this out if you have the Grants Management sample application installed. More to come from EMC hopefully.