Documentum – EMC World 2015 – Overall ECD Product Vision and Roadmap – Ahson Ahmad and Mark Arbour

Earlier this week, we wrote about the Documentum Platform Roadmap.   We, along with many other attendees, mistook the first day’s session as the overall roadmap rather than just the Documentum Platform.  This post will describe the overall Roadmap and present our thoughts.

Review of Last Year’s Roadmap – What was achieved?

2014 Roadmap and Vision presentation was lead by overall product manager Aaron Aubrecht.  Aaron has been replaced with Ahson Ahmad, a Documentum and ECM industry veteran.  Some overall thoughts when comparing the roadmap presentation from last year to the results this year.

• The bulk of priorities are consistent between different products.
• Most target dates have slipped a quarter or two.
• Target dates tend to be only 1 year out – a consistent release cadence

Overall, we liked the focus on introducing the different product managers to present their roadmaps as well as plans going forward.

Project Horizon

Ahson began with a quick discussion on Project Horizon as presented in Rohit’s keynote.  Major points included.

• Solutions – Support for Energy, Life Sciences and Health Care
• Bridge – future – way for you to run D2 and xCP (and Documentum API) at a lower cost than on premise.
• Tiles – Micro Apps and Micro Services
• Foundation (Powered by Cloud Foundry/Pivotal)

Goal would be to have Project Horizon available both to the as a public multi-tenant cloud, private cloud and on premises.

As we mentioned in our review of the keynote, we are slightly skeptical of ECD’s ability to achieve as Project Horizon seems very similar to the APaaS discussions from last years “bridge to the third platform”  presentation.  We saw a demo of the supplier exchange and it has the potential to include many Documentum/ECM capabilities  We would think the upside opportunities would be great but are concerned about the logistical (funding, focus) of a new initiative as well as the ability to replicate all of the Documentum functionality on the new platform.

Look for a deeper post on Project Horizon coming up soon.

Captiva Roadmap

Captiva 7.5 – coming next month (June).  Features will include:

• New Free Form Recognition Engine
• Architecture – Real-Time Capture Services (REST) – set of discrete capture services that can be called via a REST API. Optional component of Captiva. (good example – could use to OCR, convert to PDF, Barcode recognition, Data Extraction)
• Captiva Web Client – new front-end interface on pure HTML 5. Scan, Index and Validate Data.  Leveraging the REST Capture Services.

The understanding is that the Real-Time Capture Services can be deployed without the Captiva Input Accel Server on their own application server.  Pricing TBD.  Everyone was impressed with the demonstration.

Captiva Roadmap

• Mobile SDK 2.0 (Committed Q2 2015) – Automating the capture as much as possible. Automating the taking of the picture and new UI to assist getting the highest quality image.  Image Enhancements and a Customizable UI.
• Captiva Titanium (Targeted Q2 2016) – Completion Enhancements including rubber band, Combo box tool, print, batch selection as well as Designer Enhancements
• Mobile SDK Diamond (Targeted Q4 2016) – continued enhancements to the Mobile SDK.

TSG Thoughts – We are looking forward to the trying the new features in June.  We are very interested in the REST real time services and ability to leverage Captiva outside of the normal bulk mode.  In regards to the Web based client, it will be interesting to see how it (and the REST services) are priced for new customers as well as existing customers with the older interfaces.

ApplicationXtender8 Roadmap

As the TSG Blog is pretty focused on Documentum, we aren’t going to present detail on ApplicationXtender.

Documentum Platform Roadmap

See our Documentum RoadMap post from yesterday as the roadmap was very consistent.  Patrick added the futures slide that included:

Bedrock – Targeted Q1 2016

• Enhanced Trust and Security
• Facilitated Upgrades/Scalability/TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)
• Improved Content management – REST for Value Office Services
• Certifications (PostGres Database, SQL server Express Support for non-production, Coud Foundry and Docker Support)

Feldspar – Targeted Q1 2017

• Enhanced Trust and Security
• Enhanced Data Center Support – Rolling Upgrades, Simplified Deployment, seemless access for remote and external users
• Improved Content Management – Recommendation Engine, Advanced Intelligence and Analysis

TSG Thoughts – As we mentioned in the previous post. Most of the new improvements to the existing repository either included additional support for EMC products (storage or security) or small evolutionary (not revolutionary) improvements to REST, xPlore and transformation services.  We had a couple of discussions outside of the presentation based on a “Meet the Executives” about bigger changes.  We would love to see future roadmaps (or Project Horizon) address the bigger items and see improvements for underlying database, xPlore and other components that could be upgraded based on new technology opportunities coming from the Big Data movement and components of Project Horizon.

Records Management Roadmap

One thing many users will be happy to hear will be moving to MSG format (getting rid of EMC format).  See an old post where clients were struggling with different email formats from Documentum.

Records “Frankly” – Targeted Q3 2015

• Email Support and Migration – Replacement of emcmf & attachment separation support migration tools to update existing objects to new technology.
• Security Export Processing – Security-conscious export behavior, support for non-terminal exports for held items.
• Governance Dashboard – Automated reports on system status: at-a-glance view of system state, health, non-compliant items.
• EMC WORM device support – Support for WORM capabilities on Isilon and Data Domain.
• Post-GA certifications – Microsoft Outlook 2010 & 201

Records “GIACOMO” – Targeted for Q4 2016

• PRS Space management
• Improved Usability
• API Improvement
• App-based records access
• Certifications – DoD 5015.2, Record Activators: Office 365 & SharePoint Online

Documentum Connector for SharePoint Roadmap

D2 Configuration Support – Centralized configuration consistent with D2.

Pegasus is the next release – pulled into Q4 2015 as this was planned for 2016.  Will include:

• Seamless Collaboration – Improved data services linking, Check-in a file as a new version of existing object, Improvements to Checkout to SharePoint
• Enterprise Readiness – Content Server 7.2, D2 Hawk…

Phoenix – Targeted Q2 2016

• Cross Product Integration – Advanced D2-Config Support, xCP 2.x+ advanced interop
• Seamless Collaboration – Drag & Drop between SP & DCTM, Office Web Apps, Revamp Advanced Search – not Webtop, Additional extensibility
• Enterprise Readiness – Content Server Bedrock, REST, Windows 10*, Enhanced Authentication modes.

D2 Roadmap

D2 4.5 – Released in April.  Focus of release was Information “findability”. Included:

• Multi-Document Approval
• Support to “unlock the business value in multiple repositories” – not sure what that means – sounds like cross-repository search
• Support for Syncplicity

One item in 4.5 that was demonstrated was the D2 Intelligent URL.   Content linked to old version of a document (a new version had been created) would prompt the user that a new version exists – would they like to see the old version or the new version.  This was a complaint from one of our clients with the 4.2 version.  Other interesting parts of the demo included:

• D2 Word Based Annotations – This is different than typical PDF Annotations. Look for a post in the future as this was an interesting approach for annotating DocX formats.
• Search – New facets (hierarchical) widget – based on context with faster breadcrumbs.

We did have a discussion about Java support/ActiveX for the check-in/check-out component.  With browsers deprecating NPAPI plugins which provided browsers with Java support, we typically recommend the more vanilla non-ActiveX/Java options when available.

D2 Roadmap

Falcon – Targeted Q4 2015

• Productivity – with 508 Accessibility Improvements
• Information Integrity – REST API to allow greater opportunities to extend and integrate with D2
• Agility – Installatoin/Upgrade/Patching Improvements to help reduce costs associated with managing a D2 environment
• Solutions Packaging support to help manage and maintain complex D2 application solutions.

Hornet – Targeted Q3 2016

• Productivity – complex workflow, streamlined user experience, increased use of DQL vvariables and input validation
• Information Integrity
• Agility – Configuration improvements around property pages, importing & check-in, user settings, widgets and Workspaces

TSG Notes – it is clear that ECD is putting a big investment in D2.  I was impressed earlier in the day with the Life Sciences Solution focused on D2 presented by Jennifer Wemstorm – Senior Director, Product Management and Jessica Kelley, Quality Product Management.  We are getting mixed reactions from some of our larger clients in regards to scaling D2 but other clients are having success as presented in a later presentation by STMicroelectronics and Wilmington Savings Fund Society.

xCP 2.2 – What’s New

See post on earlier xCP roadmap presentation.  Highlights:

2.2 Released – as mentioned above – focused on:

• Developer Productivity
• Runtime Enhancements
• Certifications

1.6 SP3 – Committed Q4 2015  (readers – please notice that this is a release for the 1.x clients)

• Primary support to 2017, extended support to 2018
• Focused on upgradability of that – Form Layout – giving new widgets
• Moving to being able to better upgrade

Moonbow – Targeted Q2 – 2016 – Upgradability to 1.6 applications.   As announced last year, this release was originally targeted for Q3 2015 but 1.6 release pushed out Moonbow.

• Migration from 1.x
• Deployability & TCO

Aurora – Targeted Q1 – 2017 Focused on more Case Management.

• Security Modeling
• Rules Engine
• Scheduling
• Virtual Documents
• Case Notes

TSG Thoughts – Our initial impression is that the product team is focused on user feedback and evolving the interface.  We would say that the xCP 2.2 release is evolutionary rather than revolutionary, adding many functions that are pretty common in most ECM applications that must have been lacking for existing customers.

In regards to feedback, it was loud and clear in the roadmap discussion that long-time users have struggled with moving to xCP 2.X for a number of reasons.

• Requirement to move to 7.X backend
• Requirements around rest of stack (Webtop, other interfaces)
• Existing 1.0 applications (TaskSpace)

As we talked about last year, users were upset that their xCP 1.0 applications needed to be redone to leverage xCP 2.0.  This, combined with large amounts of content already existing in the repository, seems like the product team is focused on the next releases (Moonbow) being focused on those users and helping them upgrade to 2.x, as well as the rest of the Documentum stack (7.x).  Moonbow was originally focused on collaboration but is being refocused on existing clients.  It is interesting to hear that the forecasted 2017 Aurora release will focus on Case Management as it was the driving theme behind the xCP initial naming/push back at EMC World 2010.

Documentum eRoom & Webtop

Great discussion around Webtop and eRoom as ECD wants to keep both tools viable for 5 years.

• Aligned with Stack
• Keep using as long as you want – going to keep stack aligned.

eRoom 7.4.5 – Released 2014

Webtop 6.8 – Released December 14

eRoom – Unicorn – Targeted Q1 2016

Webtop – Firebolt – Targeted Q1 2016

Summary

In this presentation ECD continued with the trend of the past few years of posting release dates and features that were within reach.  Some quick thoughts:

• I liked the “lightning round” presentations of roadmaps, demos and questions that let us get a feel for the product managers as well as their products.
• I liked the cadence of 1+ year out roadmaps. Priorities change and spending time predicting what things will look like 2+ years from now can be a waste of time.
• Impressed by the significant investment in the D2 interface as well as the push to help helping the xCP 1.x clients
• Project Horizon has the potential to replace Documentum as the newer repository. The discussion from last year’s Application Platform as a Service (APaaS) has evolved to Project Horizon.   We agree with the approach as it was difficult to see Documentum as a platform when compared with other cloud vendors.

Overall we were impressed with Ashon, Mark and the team.  Documentum seems to be making good progress across the product stack.

Let us know your thoughts on the roadmap.