Documentum D2 vs. HPI – Administration

Both TSG’s High Performance Interface (HPI) and Documentum D2 are driven by extensive configurations made in an administration module.  In this post, we will overview the administration components available in HPI and D2 and demo making a search form configuration update in both applications.

D2’s administration module is a separate web application apart from the primary D2 interface.  It requires an ActiveX component, so therefore the D2 admin is IE-only.  D2 stores it’s configurations in the underlying repository, which makes it possible to migrate configurations between repositories with DAR project in Composer.  Somewhat unsurprisingly, D2 administration is very Documentum-specific.  For example, when configuring search, the administrator must have some knowledge of either DQL or xPlore.

The HPI admin module resides within the primary HPI web application.  Based on group membership, administrative users have access to the admin through a button in the header.  Like D2, configurations for HPI are stored in the underlying repository, which makes them portable with Composer.  One difference, however, is that HPI configurations for the most part are repository agnostic.  HPI must work this way in order to support alternative repositories such as Alfresco or Hadoop.

The video below overviews the D2 and HPI administration modules and demonstrates how to update a search form in both applications:

Overall, since both D2 and HPI are very configurable applications, they both have extensive administration capabilities.  However, while we may be biased towards HPI, we would say that HPI’s administration module require less of a learning curve vs. D2 for administrators to get started.