EMC Documentum - What is Coming

EMC Documentum - What is coming.

EMC Documentum, as many of you would be aware of is one of the leading Enterprise Content Management tools in the market. They use to be undisputed leaders at one time but over the course of last 5 years or so, they got relegated to one of the players. Most of the market share of EMC has been eaten away by products like SharePoint and to some extent OpenText.

The biggest pain problem most consumers claimed to have with EMC were its high cost of customizations and difficulty in upgrades. These were true to some extent as the WDK framework of WebTop was not the easiest to extend and at the same time, required substantial customizations for any business scenario. It was these customizations that use to fail at the time of upgrades. A bit late, but it seems EMC is finally realizing the faults of its methods and is coming out with a new set of tools and products to manage the problem areas.

Below are the meeting notes from EMC TechSet conference.

Disclaimer: The following is not attributable back to EMC. In-fact the conference was started with a disclaimer that; leaving all legal language aside; effectively said that whatever is being presented is a lie. The same applies to below too. To add to that, there is always a possibility of mishearing something

The below timelines are tentative EMC timelines and not the ones committed by EMC to their customers. Their customer committed timelines are generally one quarter later.

• xPression 4.2 will be launched in H1 2012 and 4.5 will be launched in H2 2012.
• Captiva 7.0 will come in H2 2012
• Documentum 7.0 – H2 2012
• D2 4.0 – Q3 2012
• xCP 2.0 will come in October 2012
• Kazeon 4.6 in H1 2012 and 4.7 H2 2012
• Documentum for Mobile 1.2 will come in H2 2012

 

 Let's look at all of these items in more details

D2

D2 is the new line of product that EMC has acquired and in the long run, one of the products to replace WebTop. The product is aimed at a clear separation of User Interface from the logic. Unlike WebTop or WDK where a large amount of implementation logic was written in the application, D2 tries to separate the UI related information and stores all the configurations in the Documentum repository. It creates 58 object types where all information is stored.

• Currently, it allows export of configurations from one application to another. Unfortunately, the version capability of the configurations is not yet supported. This will come sometime in future but is not yet on the road-map.
• D2 Version 4.0 is going to shift from the current JavaScript based mode to GWT based architecture.
• In future, EMC is going to continue on only two Product stacks that has a UI. They will be xCP and D2.

The use cases that goes in each product are: 

 

The key criteria of separation is that all workflow related activities (where Process Builder is needed) will be done on xCP and all small workflow (Documentum workflow manager) or non-workflow activities will be on D2.

EMC currently doesn’t have plans on selling Process Builder with D2 as a bundle. Process Builder is in xCP and not available standalone. Read later on xCP on how the licensing will work.

In D2 4.1 to be launched in 2013, all functionality of DAM, Media workstation, CenterStage and eRoom will be combined to D2. It will have features like Calendars and other collaborative features.

Cloud (onDemand)

The onDemand will run on vCube manager. EMC shall provide instantiation of a new environment on demand. The cloud can be public cloud or on-Premise. In case of need of integration with other applications of the customer, on-premise would be a better approach.

onDemand development is complete. The applications shall be ported as:

• D2 – April 2012
• D2 4.0 – Nov 2012
• onDemand Data Center – Apr 2012
• xCP – Q4 2012 (October)

Kazeon and xPlore

Kazeon is for eDiscovery tool from EMC. It integrates with Documentum, FileNet and OpenText.

xPlore has done over 1000 deployments in last six months. New features in xPlore

• Predictive Analysis
• Transaction Management
• Security – Will move to XACML to have standard security sets
• Will work with Kazeon to provide federated search
• Thesaurus
• Natural Language Processing
• Query based subscriptions (Reports generated on schedule, eDiscovery)
• Performance Improvements
• New languages being added (Russian, Brazilian, Arabic)
• Customizable processing pipeline (specially entity extraction)

xCP 2.0

Unlike xCP 1.0, xCP 2.0 is one product and not a bundle. It has two license modules. User License and Developer License.

• TaskSpace is going away. xCP 2.0 will have a UI but it is not yet named
• Process Builder is not being sold standalone. In Future, the product will go away. If you need workflows that are complex enough to have process builder, you have to go with xCP.
• Forms Builder and Composer will also go away. The new tool allows creation of forms and object model. The new forms are built on EXTJS and has lot less widgets/controls than the current form builder. At the same time, you can create custom EXTJS widgets and utilize them allowing developers to use any number of widgets.
• Business Process Analyzer and Simulator are going away. Their development will be done by a partner company

UI

The new User Interface is built on Spring framework and will support RESTful services. It is easily extendible and has a widget look. You can change the widgets to suit specific needs.

The UI supports faceted search out of the box.

Designer

The developer tool of xCP (possible name is xCP designer) will allow all things currently provided by Process Builder, Forms Builder, BPA, BAM, Composer, Business Process Integrator.

• The designer will support source control integration, is built on top of eclipse and allows versioning for all artefacts (including forms, attributes etc)
• It provides dependency resolution so any changes to object model will throw compilation errors on the dependent forms informing developers to change the same too
• The aim is to use less of dm_sysobject and dm_document. Instead, the tendency is to define objects extending documents or folders or none. Approach similar to FileNet and IBM CM.
• Designer will also provide project dependency. An object model and forms created in one project can be used in another form also making forms reusability easier across repositories.
• BAM queries can also be created directly in the designer.  

 

Documentum Platform - Changes

• Lot of features on VMWare. Learn VMWare as that is going to be highly integrated with Documentum now
• EMC now will give blueprints of ESX Server to its customers. A customer may ask for a configuration (e.g. Linux, 6 GB Ram, 4 core processor, High Availability) and EMC will give them a pre-configured blueprint that they can just deploy and get documentum up and running in all environments in a few hours. Blueprints will also support HA and DR.
• For any customer issue, the customer can generate a report from the blueprint and give that to EMC to provide answers to all questions like OS, App server etc. will also solve version compatibility issues of OS, database, App Server etc.
• The new system will allow object type relationships. E.g. One to One or One to Many. They will also support referential integrity between objects. E.g. on delete cascade in database. These references can be accesses easily with a (.) as a separator. E.g. customer.address.city
• CIS is back and is now integrated to Documentum. Taxonomy support is also integrated. Existing customers can also get CIS by talking to their account reps. You can create auto-configuration capabilities like apply a different acl to a document as it contains SSN.
• Business Events – This is a new functionality that allows you to send data on a document to BAM without routing it through a workflow. Apply a business event to a document and then when it is triggered, the data can be sent to BAM. It is like a TBO for recording data without coding.
• Structure Data Types are going away. No need for SDT as now you can directly pull package data into your task list.
• Expression Builder – A new capability in designer that allows you to show calculated values in real time on the screen or in database. E.g. Full_name = First_name + Last_Name + Middle_Name
• Adapters will go away. A new concept of stateless queries is being added on queries. These allow querying any data service (Web Service, ODBC, JDBC or others). Any process can be set as stateless query. Then the query is configured. The output of that process is the resultant of the stateless query.
• xCP 2.0 will interoperate with xCP 1.0. xCP 2.1 will not work with xCP 1.0 but will work with 2.0 so to move to xCP 2.1, migration will be needed.

Long Term Vision

• A multi-tenant cloud repository with pre-configured blueprints. Request a new tenant and get instante repository
• GreenPlum will be better integrated to Documentum
• Documentum will expose REST Services and JSON. DFS will stay but the EMC client products will move to REST based services.
• For all .NET development, Use the DFS SDK DLLs. They provide an abstraction layer on top of DFS services. The DFS service endpoints are going to change in future.
• CMIS will continue but not as the focus area. It is pretty stagnant, doesn’t have clear scope of upgrades and restricts to DM only. No RM services yet
• REST is preferred approach over WSDL as it exposes itself as a URL with Get, Post, Put and Delete operations. This allows calling REST services directly from Adobe Air or Flex making the end user interface development very simple. It returns JSON, XML or HTML file
• Developernet has Spring SDS toolkit that has a few demo on Spring framework
• Get your developers trained on Spring
• Content Transfer
• UCF .Net is available now. Other options are MTOM, HTTP and Base 64. Some performance graphs were shown showing UCF to be generally better than MTOM. Some filetypes and file sizes are better on MTOM
• MTOM currently has a limit of 100 MB
• Pattern Suggestion: Create a util class that is called and in the class, on the basis of file format or size (whatever is decided) use different transfer mechanisms
• CMIS will be deployed on method server from 6.7 onwards
• Kerberos is currently on Windows. It will also come on Solaris and Linux