Inside Documentum

Momentum 2010 pt 2

My last session of Wednesday was Mark Arbour’s roadmap session covering content intelligence products. Basically this means centerstage, media workspace (mws) and My Documentum products. It also included captive but I won’t cover that in this post. I should add that much of this is distillation and my interpretation of what Mark said.

You’ll notice that this didn’t specifically include xCP/taskspace, webtop and WebPublisher however Mark had some very interesting things to say about those as well.

First a clear statement of intent on Centerstage. CS will be the ECM client of choice. Notice the emphasis on will be, Cs is not ready for most ECM situations. The recently released version, 1.1, has a few functional features and some performance improvements that make it ready for eRoom type use cases. I’m sure Mark mentioned an eRoom migration tool to come in a few months but I didn’t write that down so may be mistaken (did anyone else hear that?).

Going forward the next few releases will concentrate on adding missing ECM features starting with repository browse and continuing on to workflow features.

Obviously this raised the question of client strategy for ECM. First webtop is planned to have a D6.7 and D7 release. Given that support will continue for 3-4 years after D7 it shouldn’t be a worry for existing customers with a significant investment in webtop.

(definitely my interpretation here) There is probably no reason for deployments that are expecting to go live in the next 6-12 months to be too concerned but it certainly makes sense to track the functional improvements of centerstage; if cs features match most of your ECM requirements then it makes sense to go with CS. The key point here is that ECM investment going forward will be in CS, there are unlikely to be any significant new features for Webtop just bug fixes and new platform certifications.

Another very interesting discussion was around EMC’S UI strategy. The perception for customers was that emc is very focussed on xCP and case management. Mark took this one head-on. First the term xCP has been used to describe a number of different things. First there is Taskspace which is the (currently) WDK based ui for transactional content management which is also core to the case management package. UI development will focus on componentizing the features of cs,mws and taskspace and moving towards a common ui infrastructure and customization approach. All 3 apps remain important and will get considerable investment.

Then there is xCP the platform. This is the tooling (composer, forms, process builder), infrastructure (content and bpm services) and the best practices and xCelerators. This is a platform for all content enabled applications, however case management has been the focus to-date. The message that I got, and this was a common theme in other EMC presentations, was that EMC will continue to pursue a wide vision for content management. Extrapolating from one of the core themes of the conference the strategy is guided by extracting intelligence from information and case management is just one branch of the strategy.

The final point I wanted to cover was Web Content Management. However I’m going to leave that to another post.