One last reminder – Midwest Documentum User Group (MWDUG) is coming up this Friday, October 29th, in downtown Chicago – presentations will include American Electric Power, United Airlines, Documentum Roadmap as well as others. There are still spots open if you are interested in attending. http://www.mwdug.com
As we were talking to users outside of the Chicago area about MWDUG, it isn’t hard to see that travel is still being restricted during the downturn (or post-downturn). Obviously, not many of us could travel to Lisbon, Portugal for Momentum 2010 this month. One thing unique this year is that
EMC/Documentum has opened up the ability to attend Momentum virtually. Slide decks and presentations will be posted next week and available virtually for only $200.
Without having seen the slides yet, we thought it would be fun to guess at what might be coming. There are a couple of YouTube videos out already with some hints.
Some of our thoughts are presented below:
“x” Marks the Spot
In working with EMC/Documentum over time, it is always interesting to compare product releases with marketing releases. For example, TaskSpace/BPM/Forms have been around since at least 2004. Renaming the product suite xCP and promoting it for Case Management was the dominant theme at EMC World 2010. For clients that have invested in TaskSpace, the naming change is no big deal. For those users that haven’t evaluated BPM/TaskSpace, they can be reintroduced to the “new” xCP product as well as other surrounding components.
For another example, the FAST replacement was initially named ESS (Enterprise Search Services), then changed to DSS (Documentum Search Services) now released as xPlore (not sure on the spelling). Given that the theme for this year’s Momentum is Explore Information, Discover Intelligence, we would anticipate lot’s of “x” themes along with a focus on the new search tool.
MyDocumentum evolves
Our other thought is that the MyDocumentum suite, particularly SharePoint, will have evolved or at least plan to evolve. Initial release was good but we would anticipate that, based on client feedback, additional capabilities and performance improvements will be coming. Based on our previous post, our guesses would be:
- Workflow – Currently the product does not provide for inbox or other workflow tasks. We could anticipate that additional capabilities makes sense for xCP and regular users to access inbox and approval tasks.
- Development Framework – Initial release had no way to add our common customizations. Clients will be pushing for a Development Framework for when “out of the box” doesn’t fit. We are hoping that the MyDocumentum for SharePoint 6.6 has more of the hooks our clients are asking to launch/develop small enhancements.
Configuration not coding
We will hear this theme over and over again. EMC/Documentum seems to be very focused on feedback that customizations are always bad. While we agree that items should be configured for common customizations, as we pointed out in a previous post, we don’t think all customizations are bad – and have found that clients want some code. Whether in the xCP or MyDocumentum suite, EMC/Documentum will be pushing for “no coding” – minimal coding is probably a more realistic theme.
Let us know your thoughts – happy to recant all of the above if we are wrong.
Paras Jethwani says
Whilst I completely agree that ‘no coding’ is more of a ‘marketing ploy’ – EMC have done a good job with TaskSpace and xForms (compared to WDK).
However, after building some innovative application prototypes on the xCP framework – I think EMC can further reduce the amount of coding requried by investing further in the xCP framework R&D.
After having built some innovative applications on the xCP framework I’d say the two areas that could further reduce reliance on coding and WDK
1. a mechanism to avoid TBOs (atleast after the initial import). currently, document post-processor adaptors don’t work OOTB because content transfer happens asynchronously and the adaptor triggers too soon.
2. UI improvements – i.e. most coding customisations are required because of some quirk in the UI process
Examples:
* the folder-content-list xForms control does not expose its data model in an xForm – this makes it difficult to trigger (configured) actions on individual documents in a folder and the only alternative is building WDK style actions with the required pre-conditions
* If a user wants to be able to add entities in a registered table as part of the import process (e.g a new company when importing a contract) – then the use of xForms to collect the new company details is not possible because the TaskSpace importer opens in a modal popup and xForms open under the ‘Open Items’ tab in the background
The xCelerator initiative on EMC Community is also helpful in reducing the coding effort required – but does not come with any support.
TSG Dave says
Paras,
Thanks for your comments.
In regards to the configuration not coding, I would say it relates to both xCP as well as MyDocumentum products. I got to see an early version of DSP 6.6 and it looks like they are supporting the ability to launch custom Web Parts/Applications so that will provide us with some ability to add code within that solution. Looking for more information in regards to xCP as it is deployed at more and more users.