The first session was very well attended (standing room only – about 90 people), presented by Nick King – xCP Product Manager. While the fact that there were few great alternative sessions may have been a factor, to fill the room early in Vegas is fairly impressive. This post will present impressions and thoughts on Documentum xCP.
xCP – Overall Thoughts
xCP has a long history with Documentum. It originally arrived back in 2007 as part of the BPM solution and was called TaskSpace. Documentum customers have always struggled between “out of the box” interfaces like Webtop, CenterStage and D2 and the ability to do custom development. TaskSpace was developed as an interface with configurable components and forms that didn’t necessarily require custom coding. It fell somewhere in between OOTB interfaces and custom interfaces built on the API.
TSG has assisted many clients in determining where custom development with Documentum tools or other tools makes sense.
xCP 2.2 Components
xCP 2.1 was released last year.
This year xCP 2.2 key themes are focused on the designer performance and usability
- UI Event and Behavior – configuration re-designed to be more consistent – allowing to publish events based on triggers (click, change, focus) and condition.
- Support for composing base artifacts to assist migration
- More widgets can have their height and width defined for improved layout
- Task List query has access to queue item ID to facilitate advanced task actions
- Allows access to repeating and single value stateless process outputs on a page
- Improved layout of selector dialog reduces scrolling
- Additional theme bundled (based on EXTheme)
Runtime enhancements
- Drag and drop from Outlook
- Validation framework
- Hit count displays in results list – result (ex: 1-5) for queries or process
- Custom error and success notifications
- Support for sorting the outputs of stateless processes
- Multi-select context menu actions
- Dynamic hiding of columns
Certifications
- Certified for IE 11
- Support for Tivoli Access Manager with WebSeal for SSO
xCP Roadmap
2.2 Released – as mentioned above – focused on:
- Developer Productivity
- Runtime Enhancements
- Certifications
1.6 SP3 – Committed Q4 2015 (readers – please notice that this is a release for the 1.x clients)
- Primary support to 2017, extended support to 2018
- Focused on upgradability of that – Form Layout – giving new widgets
- Moving to being able to better upgrade
MoonBow – Targeted Q2 – 2016 – Upgradability to 1.6 applications. As announced last year, this release was originally targeted for Q3 2015.
- Migration from 1.x
- Deployability & TCO
Aurora – Targeted Q1 – 2017 Focused on more Case Management.
- Security Modeling
- Rules Engine
- Scheduling
- Virtual Documents
- Case Notes
TSG Thoughts – xCP Roadmap
Our initial impression is that the product team is focused on user feedback and evolving the interface. We would say that the xCP 2.2 release is evolutionary rather than revolutionary, adding many functions that are pretty common in most ECM applications that must have been lacking for existing customers.
In regards to feedback, it was loud and clear in the roadmap discussion that long-time users have struggled with moving to xCP 2.X for a number of reasons.
- Requirement to move to 7.X backend
- Requirements around rest of stack (Webtop, other interfaces)
- Existing 1.0 applications (TaskSpace)
As we talked about last year, users were upset that their xCP 1.0 applications needed to be redone to leverage xCP 2.0. This, combined with large amounts of content already existing in the repository, seems like the product team is focused on the next releases (MoonBow) being focused on those users and helping them upgrade to 2.x, as well as the rest of the Documentum stack (7.x). MoonBow was originally focused on collaboration but is being refocused on existing clients. It is interesting to hear that the forecasted 2017 Aurora release will focus on Case Management as it was the driving theme behind the xCP initial naming/push back at EMC World 2010.
Look back for more posts as we have the upcoming overall roadmap presentation coming up at 12:00.
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