TSG recently had the privilege of test driving and customizing Documentum’s new collaboration solution, CenterStage Pro. CenterStage Pro is a next-generation collaboration tool and features a sleek new interface that does away with Documentum’s traditional WDK front ends.
To become familiar with the inner workings of CenterStage, we experimented with customizing the application to allow users to access our Active Wizard routing and approval tool. This is a common customization we see with many clients. The main difference between CenterStage and all previous Documentum web applications is it relies on JavaScript to do all of the work, including the implementation, as opposed to WDK’s use of Java on the backend. More specifically, CenterStage utilizes ExtJS. ExtJS is a cross-browser JavaScript library for building rich internet applications. The implementation of the actions that we created uses JavaScript objects, populated with Documentum properties for the current object, in order to pass the correct parameters into the Active Wizard.
We updated CenterStage with two very similar actions. The first action that we added launched the Active Wizard in the same window, automatically logging the user in. The user then had access to the entire Active Wizard, and when they completed their work, the “Return” link in the Active Wizard returned them to CenterStage, automatically logging them in and returning them to their last location. The second action that we added implemented all of the first action, with the addition of the ability to route a specific document using an Active Wizard form.
The overall similarities with WDK in terms of the multiple files should be an advantage to anyone familiar with WDK; however while WDK splits up the different files (ie – NLS properties, action xml, etc) into individual files for each action, CenterStage tends to group all of the string definitions into one file, all of the action definitions into one file, etc. This centralizes the work quite a bit, as you are not creating a suite of new files for each additional action.
CenterStage surprised us with its overall ease of adding the simple actions that we set out to implement. The lack of documentation made the original development somewhat difficult, as we were forced to look through the existing code to see what kind of methods existed on the JavaScript objects that Documentum was using. However, once we were able to utilize a select group of methods to our advantage, putting together the implementation for our actions was relatively simple.
Since CenterStage is still version 1.0, it has a limited amount of customization capabilities. Documentum has stated that an official customization SDK should be available with version 1.5.