Documentum explains vision behind 5.3 release

With the March 2005 launch of the latest upgrade to its enterprise-content-management (ECM) system (Documentum 5.3), EMC Documentum announced over 50 new features and functions – so it was hardly surprising that the company used its European user conference in Barcelona in late May to explain these enhancements to over 1,250 attendees.

Documentum 5.3, according to Dave DeWalt, president of the EMC Software Group, is the company’s largest release ever. In particular, it offers a new, unified architecture that enables ECM applications (including document-management, web-content-management, records-management and collaboration tools) to share the same common code base, security model, repository, object model and application programming interface (API).

The advantages of that for users are manifold, says DeWalt: simpler implementation, lower deployment and administration costs, better performance and reliability, and improved security and accountability, with unified audit trails throughout the system.

“Content management is now about far more than documents – it involves web pages, multimedia assets, records and so on. What we’ve put in place, through thousands of man-hours of development work, is a single, web-services oriented model that enables different kinds of users to access different content types,” he says.

Prior to its December 2003 acquisition by storage systems giant EMC, Documentum acquired eight companies in three years in order to add new functions such as records management and digital-asset management to its portfolio. As a result, tighter integration between these disparate elements of its overall ECM platform has been a major priority: “Customers across the globe have come to realise the functional and financial limitations of architectures that mask loosely integrated applications with a seemingly united single interface,” says DeWalt.

Customers were largely enthusiastic in their response to Documentum’s vision. “This is definitely the way we want to go with content management,” says Paul Leland, head of the ECM programme at publishing company Elsevier. “Our main focus in recent years has been implementing an architecture that can store disparate information sources in a single, central repository. However, we’ve already made a heavy investment in version 5.1, so we are looking to Documentum to show us how we can move forwards from there.”

The benefits of this unified approach are most evident when it comes to collaboration services: previously, Documentum offered users eRoom, a Microsoft-centric add-on to the company’s Java-centric platform. As a result, collaboration services were largely divorced from the rest of the package’s features and functions. With the 5.3 upgrade, by contrast, eRoom capabilities have been entirely rewritten for closer integration within the unified platform.

Other new features in version 5.3 include the Documentum Outlook Client, which enables users to save e-mail in the Documentum repository in a way that retains the same ‘look and feel’ as Microsoft Outlook. Content Transformation Services, meanwhile, enable users to convert desktop documents and rich media files (such as images and video) into different formats. New Process Connectors make it possible to integrate Documentum business-process-management products with third-party applications such as SAP’s enterprise-resource-planning software.

These enhancements provide a massive boost to EMC’s ambitious information-lifecycle-management strategy, says Toby Bell, an analyst with IT market research company, Gartner Group. That strategy, he says, now permeates the company’s entire product portfolio, “from storage management to hardware and software all the way up to the screens users see”.