Momentum 2011 part 1
October 31, 2011 at 12:25 pm | Posted in Performance | Leave a commentTags: documentum, Momentum 2011
It’s been quite a while since I last posted. Life on both a personal and business level has been super hectic for the last 6 months which meant that something had to give. This blog was one of those things and the DFCProf project the other. Things have more or less returned to normal and I hoped to be ready to start blogging by the time Momentum rolled around. And I made it … just!
I intend to get back to some regular posting as well as spend some more time digging into interesting Documentum internals and performance. I’ve already got some interesting topics in the works such as: hardware mistakes, why you should upgrade Documentum Compliance Manager (DCM) if your DCM 5.x installation performs like a dog and what children’s birthday parties can teach us about performance. I’ve also long wanted to write about Documentum folder performance myths.
First things first.My last post, sometime back in May, was from EMC World and my first interest this week at Momentum is how some of the exciting announcements from Las Vegas have panned out over the last 6 months. The really exciting stuff was around Documentum OnDemand, cloud based Documentum, Captiva and DocSciences. How close are we to a real product? EMC has been prone to make big announcements over the last few years and then be slow to follow through with actual production quality product. Will this time be different?
As usual Jeroem van Rotterdam’s future architecture, Next Generation Information Server talk will be eagerly awaited. In addition I’ll be interested to hear how people, especially other customers, have responded to the recent highly marketed Oracle attack on Documentum. Finally since I’ve been working a lot with DCM in recent months I’m interested to hear what the roadmap is for a compliance product. A while back EMC seemed to be pulling back from explicitly supporting an in house Compliance product however the more recent messages don’t seem to back that up. DCM 6.7 is out with substantially improved performance and eSigs, overlays and controlled printing are supported by new product releases.
EMC World – Introducing Captiva 6.5
May 10, 2011 at 3:32 am | Posted in Momentum | 1 CommentTags: Captiva, Capture, EMC OnDemand, EMC World, Momentum 2011
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
- 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
Migration to 6.5
-
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)
EMC World 1
May 9, 2011 at 3:44 pm | Posted in Momentum | Leave a commentTags: EMC World, Momentum 2011
Just finished breakfast at EMC World so it’s time to think about the week ahead. As usual there is so much I could see but there just won’t be time to cover everything. This is my first time at EMC World itself which compared to Momentum is just huge. So what will I be looking at and why?
First the future of Documentum. Primarily this will involve visits to Jeroem van Rotterdam’s architecture sessions but I wonder to what extent it will permeate the other sessions?Jeroem gave a tantalising glimpse in Lisbon of the concept of a Next Generation Information Server to replace the venerable Content Server. This time we are promised a demo of NGIS! Also he will be discussing the new scalable architecture. Make no mistake this is Important stuff. Much progress is being made to make Documentum suite VMWare ready but that is not the same as cloud-ready despite some of the messages that will probably come out this week. Assuming this ‘cloud thing’ will be more than just a buzzword then these developments will be essential to the future of Documentum.
Next Captiva. 6 months ago at Lisbon I was pleasantly surprised at the progress made with capture technologies. Most of my previous experience was with old Kofax versions, with VB release code, separator sheets, operator-keyed keywords and metadata. Capture was usually labour -intensive. I’m interested in seeing document learning, automated metadata capture and advanced recognition technologies driving up the ROI to make many more capture projects possible.
The next item is xCP-this is more a watching brief but I’m interested to see to what extent xCP is positioned as more than just case management.
Finally Atmos. This is a bit of a new one for me but cloud-based storage will become more and more important. It makes sense to get an understanding of what EMC has to offer in this area.
Very exciting, now for Joe Tucci’s keynote!
Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.
Entries and comments feeds.
Inside Documentum 