Documentum Web Services – Documentum DFS and TSG OpenContent

 “Why don’t I just use DFS from Documentum instead?” 

We get his question often from clients.  TSG recently had a discussion with a client on this topic.  They eventually chose OpenContent over DFS based on the following points:

Documentum Support

It might seem that a large company would be better positioned to enhance and support any software product compared with support from a small company.  As we walked through this concern with the client, we discussed how Documentum had supported previous development environments (DFC, WDK) as it related to developer support (rather than simple user interface support or back-end repository support).  In the client’s experience, custom code development support or any type of training was very limited for the Documentum development environments.  Also, the number of development environments (WDK, DFS, DFC, BOF, Adobe Flex and ExtJS) currently supported by Documentum was a concern in regards to DFS Support.  TSG support allowed the client to access an engineer on the first call.

Completeness of the Product

In comparing the DFS to OpenContent, OpenContent not only supports Documentum 5.3, 6 and 6.5 (DFS only has limited support for 6 – no support for 5.3) but the Feature set for OpenContent encompasses all of the DFS capabilities and considerably more.   A matrix style comparison can be found here –

https://tsgrp.wpengine.com/Open_Source/OpenContent/open-content.jsp

Example Code

In building a custom application, the client was looking for training as well as code examples.  DFS is not currently available with examples.  OpenContent includes multiple examples for Search, Retrieval, Check-in, Workflow and other common functions.  Training is also available from TSG – HPI example code can be found here  –

https://tsgrp.wpengine.com/Open_Source/OpenContent/open-content-hpi.jsp

Open Source

One large advantage of OpenContent is that it is available as open source.  The client needed to extend their web services layer for other repositories and capabilities not in Documentum.  DFS does not allow for customizations outside of Documentum with only customization capabilities within BOF. 

The client eventually ended up choosing OpenContent after proof of concepts with both DFS and OpenConent.