Documentum Client Briefing – Follow-up thoughts

Thanks to all the attendees (a record) at our TSG Client Briefing last week at the University of Chicago Gleacher center.  Many of the attendees mentioned it was the best one yet.  This post will share some of the discussions.

EMC World and D2

The presentation began with a lively discussion about announcements at EMC World 2012 back in May.  Most of the interest focused on D2.  Some of the clients are currently evaluating D2 and shared their experience.  Significant discussion around:

• D2 and Webtop – While they are separate products, the question of “will clients get credit for existing Webtop licensing as part of the purchase of D2” was left unanswered.
• Consulting Products/Solutions – some discussion about a renewed focus on “Solutions” from EMC and if these would become software products.

Doculabs Presentation – Enterprise Content Management Trends

James Watson from Doculabs was the keynote speaker.  James’ presentation was well received and focused on:

• Enterprise Content Management Landscape
• Social Content
• SharePoint
• Information Lifecycle Management (ILM)
• Document Auto-classification

Documentum Lessons Learned

The briefing included a discussion of “lessons learned”.  A quick politically correct summary of some of the shared items included:

• Run upgrades in test using production data before executing the upgrade in production.
• Stay away from heavily customized solutions.
• When to call the help desk versus other alternatives.
• Maintaining a “pristine” non-customized test environment to be able to document issues with EMC support.
• Issues with combining too many instances and business groups on one server in regards to server maintenance windows.
• Make sure team has time to learn Documentum.
• Allow adequate time to upgrade – even just 6.5 to 6.7.
• Line up complete components/stack for 5 year lifespan of hardware.  Particular client had an issue with WebSphere.
• Know what you are buying and be familiar with license terms and time limitations on deployment.  Understand the costs of test environments.
• Understand integration points with other systems.
• Consider alternatives to Webtop for the basic user.
• Cautiously evaluate Documentum Client for Outlook.
• Find a good partner (shameless TSG plug).
• Build your environment with redundancy in mind.  Ex: load balancing, multiple buildings.
• Position the system correctlyto end-users.
• Find some creative alternatives for training.

D2 Deep Dive

Tony presented on the results of  his earlier R&D on Documentum D2 3.1.  While the presentation was mostly PowerPoint slides, Tony included a ton of detail as well as comparisons to Webtop.  Tony also presented his thoughts on limitations of D2 to give the attendees a fair evaluation.

Dave and Ellen shared their thoughts on D2 4.0 and thoughts going forward based on the Roadmap discussions at EMC World.

TSG Mobile Presentation

Dave presented TSG’s current efforts with mobile applications on Documentum.  Most client discussions have surrounded integration points with Cloud based solutions.  The attendees agreed that mobile involved more than just a different interface.  Given that the bulk of mobile devices are purchased individually (“Bring you own Device”, or BYOD) and will not have VPN access to the corporate network, the solution should be to make Documentum accessible from the cloud, either externally hosted or in the DMZ.  TSG’s efforts focus on leveraging OpenMigrate to push and pull content to and from the cloud from the client’s Documentum environment behind the firewall. Discussions included:

• HPI Search and Retrieval for Mobile (see related post)
• Active Wizard Mobile Approval (see related post)
• Documentum IMAP integration (see related post)

All of the discussions were lively and, for the Mobile Approval discussion, a free review of the interface was set up for the attendees to review.  To see the demonstration – Mobile Approval (no password – type anything).

TSG Roadmap Discussions  HPI, Active Wizard and OpenMigrate

Tony and George presented the HPI and Active Wizard product roadmaps.  After a brief overview of the products, Tony demoed HPI’s Case Management capabilities.  George demoed some of the enhancements that were added to Active Wizard and Active Wizard Lite including:

• Answer Filters
• Currency auto-formatting
• Calculation precision
• Answer confirmations
• Rich text support in page description, question text and answer text
• Email functionality updates

George finished the presentation with a discussion around the product’s future direction.  Going forward, most Active Wizard functionality will be accessible from HPI.  This will give clients a consistent application to manage documents and forms.  Architecturally, this will allow us to better support Active Wizard on other ECM platforms, such as Alfresco. Finally, we wrapped up with a discussion about mobile devices, and TSG’s plans for an HTML5 replacement for the current Adobe Flex based Active Form module.  If you are interested in trying it, the demo is available online Active Wizard HTML5 Demo

Nickie presented on how our clients have used OpenMigrate in the past year to meet a variety of business needs.   The different types of migrations included:

• Importing of documents from an acquired company (Qumas to Documentum)
• Pushing documents to a view only search interface (Documentum to File System)
• Moving documents to an upgraded server (Documentum to Documentum)
• Adding new versions to existing documents (File System to Documentum)
• Integrating AWLite with an ECM repository (File System to Documentum)
• Email importing (Email to Documentum)
• Metadata extraction (Documentum to File System)
• Archival image importing (File System to Alfresco)

Summary

The meeting included lots of great feedback from the attendees and also some suggestions for how to improve the briefing for next year.  Based on this feedback, TSG is considering adding a TSG User Group meeting in the fall timeframe to allow clients to present their own experience.

Let us know your thoughts below.