Inside Documentum

EMC World – Introducing Captiva 6.5

This is my notes from Robert Frey’s Introducing Captiva 6.5. A number of people I spoke to today and yesterday were surprised that I was interested in Captiva. It’s probably true that ECM and its sexier cousin, Case Management, have the wider and possibly more interesting problems to solve. However capture projects have some compelling benefits too namely that they have the potential for short payback periods. Also many interesting content management projects don’t work without capture (we are still a very paper-based world).

• 6.5 was released in March this year
• The key focus was on Performance and Intelligence:
• ‘Headline’ stats of 10M pages per day
• Better (ie more automatic) deployment of certain features
• Global capture

Performance

• Undertook benchmarking
• Used a simple 10 step process
• Used multiple clients to ensure client requests were not the bottleneck
• ‘Hammered’ Captiva server – identified and eliminated bottlenecks
• Stressed that this is indicative only as performance depends on a number of variables ‘your mileage may vary’
• There is a performance tuning guide on Powerlink
• Key performance metric is number of tasks not number of pages
• performance guide shows how to calculate tasks from the modules you have configured for your process
• A sizing guide can help you turn this information into concrete capacity recommendations
• Also some specific support for Documentum High Volume server e.g. can create Lightweight Sysobjects

Production Auto Learning

• Applicable to Structure and Semi-Structured documents
• 2 new modules for use in processes:
• Dispatcher Collector
• Dispatcher Supervisor
• Use Case is as follows:
• You have a new document type (say a new type of supplier sending you invoices)
• This will exit from the classification stage as an exception that must be handled manually
• Prior to 6.5 you would need a process to manually create the new template, test and release to production
• Dispatcher Collector module ‘watches’ the operator during the manual classification stage and tries to create a new template based on the operator’s actions
• new template is passed to the Dispatcher Supervisor, a UI step that allows a supervisor to view and approve the new template and if required release into production
• Caveat: this won’t cover every single situation but it is another tool that can be used to reduce manual intervention.

InputAccel Capture Flow Designer
• A graphical design tool to replace the previous process designer very much in the xCP mould
• Used drag and drop to build the process
• Can drop down to code if necessary
• Will be the strategic development tool going forward
• Useful routing functionality to make it easy to send a processed document to different operators depending on e.g. language in the doc or security clearance required.
• No extra charge – bundled with InputAccel
• Image converter module replaces Image generator

Globalisation

• Handles Asian languages
• recognises around 130 languages

Migration to 6.5

• 5.3 life has been extended
• 5.3sp3 and sp4 can be upgraded directly to 6.5
• previous versions should upgrade to 5.3sp4 first

Capture OnDemand
• Rick Devenutti announced EMC OnDemand today
• Captiva one of the products in the first launch
• Take away the pain of system management -> can now concentrate on developing and supporting the business proceses
• Should allow customers to innovate and differentiate faster (instead of dealing with system management problems)