RIP Documentum!

Too hasty you say? But seriously though, what are the real alternatives?

First a disclosure. I’ve been away from blogging for few years to pursue another passion of mine which effectively consumed every waking moment outside my work. I enrolled in film school and here’s the trailer of my film for the curious minds.

FAST is fast gone

I was at the EMC world today and it was quite productive. I noticed Pie covered the keynote session well but couldn’t make it for Victor’s session. I tried myself to get to Victor’s session as soon as I could (ran into a buddy of mine on the way and lost some precious time) but was able to listen to the session standing. Here’re some notes:

Sharepoint/Documentum: Today and tomorrow…

Its always interesting when a company as big as Microsoft makes it way into a new niche and the leader in that domain accommodates to co-exist. Make no mistake, its a strategic move from both sides but the challenge is to help our customers strategize ECM solutions keeping long-term in mind. This is my $0.02 to understand where we are heading and how to plan for it.

EMC Documentum Support

I had experienced various interesting encounters with EMC support, but lately, I feel like they are just getting arrogant… I guess it comes with the size (Documentum to EMC) and its layers. Here are some to ponder…

BOF 1.0 and BOF 2.0

BOF is critical in getting business logic and processes implemented accurately *enterprise* wide. And its capabilities play significant role with development, deployments and migrations. First of all, I have to be honest and say how much I adore the BO framework in Documentum. When the first version came out, I loved it and loved the control it offered. And soon realized how the BO functionality wasn’t being invoked on machines where BO registration wasn’t done. And it was taken care of in 2.0, but it was not recommended to use dbor.prop although it was backward compatible. This intangible setup on a machine (using 2.0), leaves you hanging when things do not work. And the fact that individual interfaces/implementations for each business object need to be deployed OR define the same jar over and over for each business object if you decide to club all together – not perfect yet…

BPM

Documentum’s BPM is one of those technologies which business can’t wait to implement. The evolution from the Workflow Manager to this is quite remarkable. And, in all fairness, I should also say that its gotten quite temperamental over time, rightly so, at the rate at which the features are being added in.

Setting up an unsupported active-directory

I was recently asked by a technologist on how to go about adding a new active directory sync which is not supported by Documentum. As I was thinking through it, I remembered that James McGovern had posed this question in the past – Why does Documentum need its own user store when it can use other systems which are developed solely for this purpose?

Supporting Workflows

The success of a production deployment can be analyzed with the amount of support which goes into maintaining and/or trouble-shooting the application. One of the challenges in a production release tends to do with the workflows. Several times in the past, I had to run variety of queries to identify various combination of results relating to workflows. In the process I developed this cheat sheet for myself which gives a quick overview of the workflows and what you have to query for.

Are all your scanned documents accounted for?

The most important aspect of integrating two systems is to assure that there is a solid hand-shake and that the communication is accurately handled. Consider this transaction between Input Accel & Documentum:

Export Module> Request is made to create an object type for document
Content Server> returns Object id
Export Module> Set attributes for document
— network error —

What's new in D6

Here are some hot new features in D6. Please feel free to share if you know more
ACS/BOCS:

• ACS/BOCS server can write content to a repository, either synchronously or asynchronously. Writing content synchronously ensures that all users at all network locations have immediate access to the content. Writing content asynchronously improves the performance of import and check-in operations, because remote users do not need to wait for the content to be uploaded to the central site. And Content can be pre-cached on BOCS servers using new BOCS caching jobs.
• DA can be used to gather key statistics about cache requests and monitor status of the ACS and BOCS servers