EMC World – 2011 – Day One – Morning Highlights – Web Services

After a rough flight and hotel screwup, finally got into the Venetian early this morning.  We are trying to post fast and furious so apologize for any spelling errors or initial thoughts.  Today’s post will highlight some of the interesting sessions in the morning and focus on announcement around Web Services.  

Joe Tucci Keynote

Theme for this year is “Cloud Meets Big Data” – Joe’s kickoff seemed to lack the energy of previous EMC Worlds.  For our Documentum readers, really no discussion on Documentum in the keynote although Joe’s keynotes has traditionally been short on Documentum ties.  Traditional numbers about how much storage is growing, IT Pain Points (Budget, Data Deluge and Security) and how EMC is addressing.   Sure it will be posted on YouTube – will add link when available.

EMC Documentum Web Services Overview and Strategy

Session was described as a discussion of DFS (SOAP) and CMIS (SOAP and REST).  Session targeted examples as well as insight into overall strategy and upcoming improvements.

Big theme of the presentation was the “reprioritization” of a RESTful API for Documentum.  Initially this effort was started back in 2009 and really didn’t take off and was deprioritized.  Plans for the remainder of 2011 are an Early Adopter program to further define the product with a targeted release in 2012.  More on RESTful later in the post.  Presentation highlighted when to use:

• DFS – Tightly Coupled Systems
• CMIS – Basic Level Access
• RESTful – Easy to consumer with minimal code.  Targeted for Rich/Mobile Applications

DFS –  Highlighted the changes for D6.7 (recently released).  Most of the focus is on quality and bug fixes.  Some better support for UCF for .Net.  DFS will still be the underlying mechanism for CenterStage and the MyDocumentum suite among other things. 

CMIS – Documentum is really focused on CMIS as an Interoperability tool across repositories.  Most scenarios focused on

1. Building applications that could be platform agnostic.  For example, if SAP supported CMIS, the idea would be that documents from SharePoint, Documentum, Alfresco or other respositories could all be retrieved very easily.
2. Unifying across repositories – The other basic case study was the ability for a federated search across repositories.  Similar to the scenario above, in this case the CMIS built application would access a search across more than one repository rather than one repository at a time.

To differentiate with DFS, the presentation viewed CMIS as being “not as rich in regards to functionality” as DFS.  While other CMIS vendors would probably argue that CMIS can be as robust as DFS or other web services, the presentation did bring up a valid scenario (Virtual Documents) that would be difficult to define a common standard around.  That being said, not sure DFS fully addresses all of the Virtual Document functionality. 

TSG Take – One concern with Documentum CMIS support is Documentum’s commitment to it given DFS, DQL and upcoming RESTful environments.

RESTful API – Majority of presentation focused on the new effort to reprioritize the RESTful API development.  Documentum is looking for “new developers” – in particular they mentioned/demonstrated an iPad application but would expect that subsequent keynote addresses and sessions focused on how to get Documentum as infrastructure for new applications.  The focus on RESTful services was a focus to have their tools easier to develop on for a majority of different development environments (think Apple, Android….).  Some points from the presentation:

• Early Adopter program will be starting this year running through end of year – used to define specification.
• Will be targeted for underlying architecture of xCP in 2012.
• Released with D7 targeted Q2/Q3 2012
• DFC/BOF still underlying RESTful API
• Initiative started 4 weeks ago
• A couple of other products (we have to wait until afternoon sessions to learn other products).  Would guess it is something mobile, Centerstage rewrite other iPad – other applications.

Overall – hard to get excited about a future effort just started 4 weeks ago.  Some specifics though:

• xCP, currently on WDK, will not be rewritten on DFS (something planned last year) but will be targeted for new RESTful API.
• DFC is under RESTful API – will be around for awhile
• Clients should evaluate RESTful API once complete – targeted for end of year.
• Difficult to really comment on something so new (4 weeks from our understanding)

Please post your thoughts or any follow-up questions.  One concern of clients has been pricing for these typically “custom” applications.  We didn’t ask pricing questions as that seemed out of context given the architect focus of the presentation.