EMC World – Delta Airlines using Documentum Across a Global Organization

I went to see a fellow Midwest Documentum User Group member, Sandy Shackelford from Delta Airlines, present at 2:00 on Monday at EMC World. She gave a down-to-earth presentation that spoke about ECM at Delta. I personally appreciated that the presentation didn’t try to make their implementations sound slick and fancy. It was an accurate representation of the “down and dirty” work required to support multiple Documentum applications within a company. Much of it is Documentum 101.

Like many companies in the mid 90’s, Delta started using Documentum in a more departmentalized fashion. In 2000, like many other companies, they invested in enterprise hardware that allowed other departments to utilize the Documentum software investment without having to worry about the hardware costs. At that point Documentum, became an enterprise offering. That investment took them to where they are today – 19 repositories, 6 terabytes of content, 7000 named users and growing all the time. They have a staff of 9.5 FTEs to support and grow their Documentum platform.

To maintain control, the Documentum group created standards for naming conventions, folder structure, permission sets, and training guides. This assisted the Documentum group in maintaining control and not letting the Documentum installation become unruly. Now the Delta Documentum team is supporting the following major applications – Technical Publishing, Training, Imaging and Archive, Web Content, General Documentation, Collaboration, Records Management.

At Delta they are seasoned Documentum implementers. They also touched on

• Upgrades -making sure their users don’t loose functionality
• SharePoint – Discussed their use of SharePoint – limited document management more focused on collaboration. Use Documentum for more robust content management.
• Custom Applications – Keep it Simple and Straightforward (KISS). Customize when you have to, look to simplify prior to customizing

Thank you Delta for those Documentum 101 best-practices reminders!