• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
TSB Alfresco Cobrand White tagline

Technology Services Group

  • Home
  • Products
    • Alfresco Enterprise Viewer
    • OpenContent Search
    • OpenContent Case
    • OpenContent Forms
    • OpenMigrate
    • OpenContent Web Services
    • OpenCapture
    • OpenOverlay
  • Solutions
    • Alfresco Content Accelerator for Claims Management
      • Claims Demo Series
    • Alfresco Content Accelerator for Policy & Procedure Management
      • Compliance Demo Series
    • OpenContent Accounts Payable
    • OpenContent Contract Management
    • OpenContent Batch Records
    • OpenContent Government
    • OpenContent Corporate Forms
    • OpenContent Construction Management
    • OpenContent Digital Archive
    • OpenContent Human Resources
    • OpenContent Patient Records
  • Platforms
    • Alfresco Consulting
      • Alfresco Case Study – Canadian Museum of Human Rights
      • Alfresco Case Study – New York Philharmonic
      • Alfresco Case Study – New York Property Insurance Underwriting Association
      • Alfresco Case Study – American Society for Clinical Pathology
      • Alfresco Case Study – American Association of Insurance Services
      • Alfresco Case Study – United Cerebral Palsy
    • HBase
    • DynamoDB
    • OpenText & Documentum Consulting
      • Upgrades – A Well Documented Approach
      • Life Science Solutions
        • Life Sciences Project Sampling
    • Veeva Consulting
    • Ephesoft
    • Workshare
  • Case Studies
    • White Papers
    • 11 Billion Document Migration
    • Learning Zone
    • Digital Asset Collection – Canadian Museum of Human Rights
    • Digital Archive and Retrieval – ASCP
    • Digital Archives – New York Philharmonic
    • Insurance Claim Processing – New York Property Insurance
    • Policy Forms Management with Machine Learning – AAIS
    • Liferay and Alfresco Portal – United Cerebral Palsy of Greater Chicago
  • About
    • Contact Us
  • Blog

Documentum Upgrade Alternatives

You are here: Home / Documentum / D6.5 / Documentum Upgrade Alternatives

February 17, 2010

I was talking to a client yesterday struggling with decisions on upgrading Documentum.  Currently the client is on Documentum 5.3 SP5 and is paying EMC for additional support since 5.3 SP5 is no longer supported under standard support.  This is not an uncommon situation with many Documentum clients for some of the following reasons:

  • Over the history of the Documentum installation, many customizations have been made to the system that would require rework in order to upgrade to Documentum 6.5.
  • Other components in the upgrade/stack would require upgrade to Documentum 6.5 as well.  This could include annotations, database, server operating system,  PDF Watermarks, full text indexing and other difficult to coordinate components.
  • Reduced IT budgets have made the cost of the upgrade prohibitive.
  • Business users are not sure what benefits they will get for the cost, risk and disruption of the upgrade.

While the answer isn’t easy, I thought I would use this post to highlight some alternative approaches that clients don’t always consider and highlight some of the costs and benefits.

  • Never upgrade without a business justification – One major life-sciences client has taken this approach given the huge amount of investment in their current 5.3 implementation.  While they are paying for additional support from Documentum now, they are not concerned at being out of support given the knowledge within their team as well as having a support agreement with TSG in place.  Another client went from 5.2.5 to 6 (skipping 5.3 entirely) for the same reason.  The client estimated they saved at least $1,000,000 by skipping a release without any lost business functionality.
  • Make the system more easily upgradable – Another 5.3 client is working on application changes on Documentum to make the system easier to upgrade.  This includes removing most of the Custom WDK/Webtop interface components in favor of a consumer driven interface based on HPI and Lucene,  as well as  a new approval interface with the Active Wizard.  The applications work both on the existing Documentum 5.3 instance and Documentum 6.5 and will ease the clients application upgrade effort.  Another post for this client is located here.
  • Upgrade just the backend – Most clients only consider upgrading ALL of Documentum from 5.3 to 6.5.   (Webtop and the Database/Repository).  From reading Documentum Upgrade and Migration guide on Powerlink, Documentum does support Webtop 5.3 with a Documentum 6.5 backend with a few tweaks.  For certain situations, this approach might make sense including:
    • Support – Most of our clients really want Documentum support for the back-end (DB, Repository….) when things go really wrong.  Front-end support of Webtop especially given customizations, is difficult for Documentum and not always needed by clients or supported by Documentum.
    • Performance – Documentum 6.5 does offer performance improvements providing benefit with the back-end upgrade.  Also, clients look to either replace Verity/FAST with Lucene or other performance improvement components associated with the back-end.  
    • Upgrade Gradually – With the back-end upgraded, clients can pursue a case by case or department by department upgrade rather than a big bang.  For our client that had 10 different instances of Webtop, this makes sense as the easier ones can go first and gradually other applications can be upgraded if necessary.
  • Move platforms – Unfortunately, the cost of the Documentum upgrade can also result in pursuing a strategy of changing platforms.  The argument would follow that “if it is going to cost this much to upgrade Documentum, why not just change to another vendor for the same price”.  This can be especially true after a difficult software audit.  While we are big fans of Documentum from a software platform and ECM capabilities perspective, we do understand the cost of support/upgrade that can result in a new platform.  Look for a later blog post for a client that moved 300 gigabytes from Documentum to Alfresco within the Amazon Cloud.

Please comment below your thoughts/experience in regards to any of the above.

Filed Under: D6.5, Documentum, OpenContent Forms, OpenContent Management Suite, OpenMigrate, Upgrades

Reader Interactions

Trackbacks

  1. Documentum – What’s Next Updated for 2010 « TSG Blog says:
    February 23, 2010 at 3:26 pm

    […] throughout blog.tsgrp.com for many posts including upgrade alternatives, extends versus modifies in 6.5, understanding the impact of WDK development, migration, clone or […]

    Reply
  2. Predictions for EMC Documentum in 2013 « TSG Blog says:
    December 10, 2012 at 2:17 pm

    […] them the ability to evaluate other platforms in the future. See a blog post  about this approach HERE.  Along with the D7 evaluation, and the increasing Documentum maintenance costs (see more below), […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

Search

Related Posts

  • Documentum – What’s Next Updated for 2010
  • TSG Open Source Product Plans
  • Documentum – EMC World/Momentum 2012 – TSG Recap
  • Documentum 6.5 Upgrade – Character Encoding Issues
  • Documentum – Top 12 Tips
  • Documentum Full Text Search with Lucene – Honoring ACL Security
  • Documentum Search – Lucene, FAST, Verity, Google and upcoming DSS
  • Documentum Consulting and Open Source
  • Increase in downloads of Documentum Open Source from TSG
  • Upgrading your Webtop 5.3 Application NOW to simplify your 6.5 upgrade later

Recent Posts

  • Alfresco Content Accelerator and Alfresco Enterprise Viewer – Improving User Collaboration Efficiency
  • Alfresco Content Accelerator – Document Notification Distribution Lists
  • Alfresco Webinar – Productivity Anywhere: How modern claim and policy document processing can help the new work-from-home normal succeed
  • Alfresco – Viewing Annotations on Versions
  • Alfresco Content Accelerator – Collaboration Enhancements
stacks-of-paper

11 BILLION DOCUMENT
BENCHMARK
OVERVIEW

Learn how TSG was able to leverage DynamoDB, S3, ElasticSearch & AWS to successfully migrate 11 Billion documents.

Download White Paper

Footer

Search

Contact

22 West Washington St
5th Floor
Chicago, IL 60602

inquiry@tsgrp.com

312.372.7777

Copyright © 2023 · Technology Services Group, Inc. · Log in

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. Please accept this site's cookies, but you can opt-out if you wish. Privacy Policy ACCEPT | Cookie settings
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Non-necessary
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
SAVE & ACCEPT