Attending the first session with David Mennie, Patrick Walsh and Peggy Ringhousen – Peggy did a great job last year with the D2 Unveiling last year so I thought I would check this out. Got some great information and preview of later presentations.
David Mennie – Product Marketing
David mentioned that this is the first year with a specific track for migrations and upgrades.
- Why Upgrade – Product Innovation, Lower TCO, Enhanced Security and Information Control, Private Cloud Ready
- How to Upgrade– Best practice strategies, EMC Professional Services Assessments, Rapid Success Programs, Intelligent Deployment and Upgrade Tools.
- When to Upgrade– Scheduling Considerations, Support Timelines, Next Steps
In talking with other clients last night (shout out to our mini-utility group dinner), we were slightly questioning the Why Upgrade? Throughout the presentation, there was not a ton of justification for the Lower TCO (total cost of ownership). Given that the migration will require money, time, effort and re-training along with potential purchase of new software (D2, xCP) and configuration/validation of that software, we thought it was a stretch to justify lower TCO due to just performance of D7 or the new interfaces involving less customization.
Specifically on the products, David mentioned:
- xCP 2.0: Dropping WDK, with more extended JavaScript similar to D2. Bulk of the discussion was on how xCP 2.0 is better than xCP 1.0. (We Agree) We would say that it has been a much needed rewrite as we never really liked the whole framework (TaskSpace/WDK) of xCP. The big push on “not writing code” and “configuration” with a variety of widgits is something clients will have to evaluate on their own.
- Captiva 7.0 – Talked about Production Auto Learning. Similar to D2 upgrade, we did talk to one Captiva client in the Lounge on how they need to migrate all their configurations/customizations to Captiva 7.0 and were concerned about the effort.
- D2 4.1 –The Power of Configuration.
Major Reasons to Upgrade
- Lower TCO – Scalability, reduced compliance overhead, do more with less for less. Documentum 7.0 has better Memory Usage and Scalability – presented Graphs and discussions that I will try to post here when released. Performance is focused on session pooling and session management, memory management and intelligent session management. Key stat was reduces response time by up to 10x for 200 DFC users. (Benchmark was conducted on Windows Servers – on content server – is the DFC test utility).
- Secured Protection, Faster – High Volume Retention, Faster Encryption, LDAP group Synchronization.
- Enhanced Secuirty with Greater Information Control – FIPS 140-2, Level 1 Compliance, Centralized Key Mangement, 128-bit AES-based Encryption.
Presentation included some discussion on xPlore, GreenPlum and Syncplicity – not sure how this ties into the Upgrade/Migration. Very consistent typical discussion of the IIG suite and integration between products withinin the IIG suite. (xCP and Greenplum, D2 and Syncplicity, xPlore and exposing faceted search). EMC OnDemand – all designed to be optimized for that setting.
How to Upgrade? – Patrick Walsh
Best practice strategies
- Decoupled Clients and Platform – Basically saying that the D6.7 SP2 Client can work on D7 and D6. Recommending upgrading client and server separately.
- Phased Upgrade Path – This was one of the more interesting and got a lot of questions. Basically, Documentum would like to leverage D6.7 SP2 as the bridge. Ability to put either D2 or xCP 2.0 on D 6.7 backend first and then move the back-end to 7.0.
Basic approach
- D6.7 SP1 and earlier clients WILL work with D6.7 SP2 backend
- D6.7 SP1 and earlier clients WIL NOT work with Content Server 7.0
- D6.7 SP2 clients WILL work with D6.7 SP2 backend
- D6.7 SP2 clients WILL work with Content Server 7.
We were slightly concerned that the D6.7 SP1 and newer clients would never work on 7.0. Need to ask more questions on that and why the limitation (or do some digging ourselves). Patrick did state that DFC applications that could use the D6.7 SP1 DFC could use the D6.7 SP2 DFC as long as fairly vanilla.
WebPublisher that will work with D7. Same answer for CenterStage. No 6.7 SP1 Clients not recommended for Content server 7.
Did see some roadmap slides worth sharing – probably more in later sessions today:
- Webtop 6.7 SP2 – Was 1st Quarter 2014
- DAM and CenterStage – 3rd Quarter 2014
- Rich Media and Centerstage – 4th Quarter this year
My picture was fuzzy but will try to update later.
Upgrade and Migration Stregies.
- Side by Side – Existing solution with older clients with new versions working on 7 – content not being touched. No interoperability between the content from old and new (xCP 2.0 example mentioned). New behaviors in the model that xCP 1.0 doesn’t know about.
- Content Interop – Both existing and new solutions share information in the Documentum repository.
- Migration – leverage migration appliance (mentioning next) to newer client technology.
As mentioned earlier, we need more detail, particularly on the Side by Side, on why the newer applications made such a change to the data model.
Free Assessment, D7 Rapid Success Program and Migration Appliance
We thought one of the biggest announcements was the EMC Professional Services Upgrade Assessments. IIG is offering free one-week Assessment until August 13th in regards to migration.
D7 – Rapid Success Programs- Limited enrollment space. Space is limited. Enhanced support from D7 engineering team that built and support the application.
Documentum Enterprise Migration Appliance (EMA) – Provided by EMC Professional Services – we need some more detail on this. Will be based on SpringBatch (we like this) but only available through professional services.
Summary
Over dinner, we talked about the subtle hints in the presentation and look forward to learning more today. Clients we talked to were somewhat concerned about letting EMC do an assessment as to many clients were burned by the Software Audits a couple of years ago and were not sure they have the trust to let Documentum poke around in their system. Clients need to make their own decision whether D2 and xCP 2.0 really do reduce their TCO and are truly “better” than their existing environments to justify the assessment combined with migration effort, cost and risk.
The migration appliance is interesting. Tied to the change in the object model and behaviors for both D2 and xCP, IIG needs to offer a way to get existing clients and applications to the new model on 7.0 to leverage the new tools. The appliance moniker makes it sound like it is more than software and smarter than existing solutions. As a firm that has been doing migrations for years with OpenMigrate, we know the complexity of migrations and question how an “appliance” can accomplish the specific needs of clients in regards to delta migrations, custom database lookups and some of the other complexity we routinley see. We will keep an open mind and see what future sessions explain.
Let me know your thoughts below.
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