Technology Services Group

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Supersized Documentum Migrations and Upgrades Two Billion Documents and Counting

Two weeks ago we completed several of the largest Documentum migrations and upgrades we’ve ever seen. With short outage windows, we helped plan and support our client’s migration of their Documentum systems from a data center in the southeast US to the Rockies while simultaneously upgrading the repositories from Documentum 6.5 to 6.7 SPx. Altogether the repositories contained over 2 billion documents,  several TB of file server and multiple Centera devices; as well as over 425,000 ActiveWizard ... [Continue Reading]

Documentum Upgrade – Support Multiple Applications using a single HPI Solr Portal Cache

Recently one of our large pharmaceutical clients replaced a Documentum interface in a .NET application with access to an HPI Portal cache. The HPI Portal cache utilizes Apache Solr to store and serve approved content outside of Documentum for scalability and business continuity. This change resolved a significant maintenance problem for the application team, removed a roadblock that had halted a server upgrade, and improved performance of the .NET application for document retrieval.  ... [Continue Reading]

Documentum Upgrades – Handling eSignatures in Documentum 6.6+

Starting in Documentum Content Server 6.6, using the eSignature mechanism uses iText rather than PDF Fusion to create the electronic signature page. Documentum made this move to iText in order to be able to support creating eSignatures when the content server was running on a Unix/Linux environment, which was previously unsupported. Using the eSignature mechanism still requires a TCS (Trusted Content Services) license from EMC. ... [Continue Reading]

Documentum D7 – Initial Thoughts

As many Documentum customers know, the end of 2012 saw the initial official release of Documentum D7, something that was announced back at EMC World in May.  We have recently been evaluating the release to determine what’s new, what’s changed, and what the potential impacts could be for our clients as they plan for the future.  We will be posting to the blog over the next weeks as we proceed through our evaluations and test upgrade paths so be sure to stay tuned, but we wanted to share some ... [Continue Reading]

Documentum Upgrade to 6.7 – a simple approach

Back in July, we wrote a lessons learned post regarding upgrading from Documentum 6.5 to Documentum 6.7.   We have a client that recently completed, by himself, a Documentum upgrade from 6.5 SP3 to 6.7 SP1.  While TSG often assists clients in the Documentum upgrade process, some clients are very capable of performing upgrades on their own if they chose a simple approach.  This post will share some of the client’s thoughts on the upgrade and how the combination of TSG products as well as good ... [Continue Reading]

Documentum 6.5 to 6.7 Upgrade Lessons Learned

TSG  recently assisted a client with upgrading their Documentum 6.5 environment to 6.7. Products included Content Server, xPlore, Business Process Manager (BPM), Content Transformation Services (ADTS, AVTS, MTS), DA, Webtop, Records Manager, Retention Policy Services (RPS), Archive Services for Reports (ASR), and TaskSpace. The client also runs TSG’s High Performance Interface (HPI) and OpenContent products. ... [Continue Reading]

Documentum – EMC World/Momentum 2012 – TSG Recap

Thanks to all subscribers for making this one of our most successful weeks with the blog.  We always get lots of feedback that our take on announcements and learning sessions at EMC World/Momentum is our most popular topic.  Also, it was great making new friends face to face who opened with “I really like your blog!!!”  This post will try to wrap-up and summarize all the other postings, as well as express the TSG opinion on the event. ... [Continue Reading]

Documentum 6.7 Upgrades and Hardware Changes

With Documentum 6.5 SP3 going out of support this year (August 31, 2012), we’re running several Documentum upgrade projects for clients this quarter. Unlike in the past where upgrades promised fantastic new functionality, this round of upgrades is trending more towards maintaining supported configurations and upgrading to new hardware. In addition, rather than simply upgrading the OS, companies are virtualizing servers and rolling out 64-bit hardware wherever possible. ... [Continue Reading]

Documentum xPlore Deployment – Lessons Learned from Pharma Implementaion

We're working with a large Pharmaceutical company to install Documentum xPlore as a replacement for FAST.  We've just finished the QA environment deployment, and we're planning for the Production deployment in mid-April.  For this post, we are going to discuss the cutover strategy as well as some lessons learned from the project. ... [Continue Reading]

Documentum – EMC World – Momentum 2012 – Early Predictions

Once again TSG is attending EMC World in Las Vegas – May 21-24.  For those interested, early discounts are still available at http://www.emcworld.com/momentum.htm.  While not much is known at this point in time about the final agenda list (or who the opening/closing acts are), this post will try to take a guess at the dominant themes based on the Momentum Conference Agenda. ... [Continue Reading]

Documentum 5 vs. 6, Databases and Dates: Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?

When EMC revealed Documentum 6 a few years ago, they made a subtle—yet important—change to the way Documentum would store dates and times in the database. While most clients would never even notice the change, some of us would. In particular, when it becomes necessary to access the underlying database tables, like OpenMigrate can when preserving modification dates, confusion can be the order of the day. ... [Continue Reading]

Documentum Workflow Manager, BPM, and Licensing

We just finished a new 6.6 Documentum install for a client and ran into something slightly unusual.  During the installation, we were not able to install a workflow template from an existing archive, a routine install activity.  In the past, we could always move workflow templates between repositories using Application Builder and Installer and create new templates with Workflow Manager.  While Documentum Application Builder and Application Installer became unsupported with the release of ... [Continue Reading]

Documentum Compliance Manager (DCM) 6.5 Upgrade Thoughts

Many Documentum Compliance Manager (DCM) 5.3 users are reaching a decision point on upgrading to DCM 6.5.  The typical driver is primary support for DCM 5.3 expired on 12/31/2009 while DCM 6.5 will be supported until 08/31/2012.  Typically DCM is used by companies operating in regulated industries (ex: pharmaceutical manufacturing) to meet regulatory requirements around managing their documentation (SOPs, Specifications, etc.) electronically.  The product consists of extensions of the current ... [Continue Reading]

Documentum 6.5 Upgrade – Character Encoding Issues

Special Note:  Anyone that is planning an upgrade from Documentum 5.3 to 6.5 should look closely at this note as some types of upgrades (clone or in-place) could result in content that was retrievable from 5.3 not being available in 6.5. This post was developed based on recent work for a major pharmaceutical client.  The client, on Documentum 5.3, was developing a consumer interface application leveraging Lucene.  As we mentioned in a previous post, the client chose Lucene over FAST based on ... [Continue Reading]

Documentum Health Check

For many clients, one of our first projects is a Documentum Health Check.  This is typically a 2-3 day project where one of our technical architects will visit onsite to review all the different components of the Documentum environment.    We encourage this type of project as it allows us to be more pro-active with identifying possible issues rather than re-active when issues surface.  This post will describe the typical activities of a Documentum Health Check engagement as well as typical ... [Continue Reading]

Documentum Support and Maintenance – Thoughts on continuing for WDK based applications

In this difficult economic environment, many clients are scrutinizing every bill to look for ways to reduce costs.  A client called me the other day in reviewing their current maintenance agreement with Documentum/EMC.  As with most clients, Documentum maintenance was 19% of the purchase price.  My clients rather leading question was: “Given that Documentum has announced that they are not investing in WDK based solutions like Webtop and DCM, should I continue paying maintenance on these ... [Continue Reading]

Migrating From Documentum with OpenMigrate: Best Practices

OpenMigrate, TSG’s open source migration framework, supports migration to and from a number of ECM repositories, including Documentum, Alfresco, FileNet and SharePoint (and many others). We’ve designed OpenMigrate to perform several different types of migrations: Between different instances of the same ECM product (e.g., during an upgrade) Out of one ECM technology into a “neutral zone” (usually a file system and database or text files for metadata) From a neutral zone into an ECM ... [Continue Reading]

Documentum – Top 12 Tips

Every couple of months we like to step back and offer a “What’s next” post in regards to our thoughts on what Documentum customers should be considering with their implementations.  For this post, we will highlight our thoughts based on a thorough review of EMC World and our client briefing discussions. ... [Continue Reading]

D6.5 Upgrades and Complex Passwords

Recently a client that uses Documentum WebPublisher went live with a D6.5 SP2 upgrade.  All the appropriate planning was done in preparation for the launch as detailed in this prior post. The upgrade in the development environment exposed some updates that needed to be made to supporting DFC based applications, but the upgrade process itself went very smooth.  Finally, it was time to cutover to 6.5 and the green light was given to upgrade.   Right off the bat we ran into trouble installing the ... [Continue Reading]

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