Recently TSG has assisted multiple clients with unique scenarios to make Alfresco queries more efficient. Like a good auto mechanic that has learned tips and tricks for getting better performance from a car without sacrificing quality, TSG has recently developed performance improvements for Alfresco in OpenContent to address clients’ needs. This post will summarize the approach and updates to OpenContent Web Services. ... [Continue Reading]
Debugging Documentum ADTS Transformation Failures
A client recently encountered an issue with their Documentum 6.7 environment where PDF renditions for certain document types were not being created. The client's environment was leveraging Advanced Document Transformation Services (ADTS) 6.7, which utilizes Adlib as its underlying renditioning engine for rendering PDFs. As we discussed in a previous blog post, Documentum had announced end of life for support for ADTS at the end of 2016, and thus we at TSG were tasked with figuring out exactly ... [Continue Reading]
Alfresco and Angular 2.0: Technical First Look
In July, Alfresco released a new Angular 2 framework which promises to deliver developers a new modern way to develop custom Alfresco applications. This post will cover what we've learned about this new framework. Watch a quick demo of the new Angular Interface. https://youtu.be/JHSfLmpFcsI When releasing this framework, Alfresco is actually releasing three different independent pieces. Let's dive into each: ... [Continue Reading]
Avoiding Alfresco Performance Problems from Day 1 – Keeping My ECM Healthy
One of the great things about Alfresco is that it offers all-in-one installation packages to make installation simple on both Windows and Linux servers. With a few clicks, you can have an Alfresco repository deployed and running in a matter of a few minutes. This is especially useful when setting up development environments. When using the all-in-one installer, some of the repository configuration is determined based on how you answer questions in the installation wizard, like whether or not ... [Continue Reading]
Alfresco’s Transactional Metadata Query System – Mystery Results
With the release of version 5.0, Alfresco officially stopped supporting the Lucene indexing subsystem, leaving Solr as Alfresco's lone indexing solution. A major benefit of leveraging Lucene was its in-transaction indexing, making content searchable as soon as it was created. Solr, however, utilizes asynchronous indexing which leads to "eventual consistency", meaning newly created content is not searchable right away. This poses problems when building solutions for clients that need a ... [Continue Reading]
FileNet Migration Findings
Editor's Note: This article was originally posted in August of 2010. We’ve been answering quite a few questions lately from businesses looking to migrate off of their older FileNet systems. Having been away from this area for a bit, I was looking back over some older blog entries I had written. I came across this write-up, which described a unique engagement where we ended up pulling some of the FileNet migration knowledge we had put INTO OpenMigrate, OUT OF OpenMigrate, and using it as the ... [Continue Reading]
Upgrading to Alfresco 5 – Keys to Success
With the recent release of Alfresco 5 Enterprise, many clients are beginning to plan to upgrade to the latest version of Alfresco in the coming months. On January 8th, TSG participated in an Alfresco Tech Talk Live Session that focused on upgrading to Alfresco 5. Alfresco Tech Talk Live is a regularly scheduled webcast where a panel of subject matter experts discuss various topics related to Alfresco. A recording of the Alfresco 5 Upgrade session can be found here. A complete list of ... [Continue Reading]
Harnessing the Power of Alfresco Data Lists for Cascading Value Assistance
One of the most common Alfresco customization requests that we receive from our clients is for a way to allow metadata constraint lists to be managed by business users, rather than by IT. TSG has developed an Alfresco Module Package (AMP) that allows picklist values to be managed using the data list functionality in Alfresco Share. See our previous post on Alfresco Data List-Driven Value Assistance for more information on this module. This post will focus on recent enhancements to the Data ... [Continue Reading]
Auto-Numbering Content in Alfresco
To continue our series of posts highlighting common design patterns that we see in many Alfresco implementations (see previous posts on Auto-Filing and Data List-Drive Value Assistance, this post will focus on another Alfresco module package (AMP) that TSG has developed that provides a configurable way to automatically number content with a unique numbering sequence upon creation. ... [Continue Reading]
Auto-Filing Content in Alfresco
After working with Alfresco for a while, we’ve noticed a number of design patters and functionality that are common amongst many clients across various industries. Alfresco module packages (AMPs), make it easy to package up components and reuse them in different Alfresco implementations. This article will focus on one reusable module that automatically files content into a folder structure in an Alfresco repository based on metadata. ... [Continue Reading]
Alfresco Post-Installation Configuration
One of the often overlooked steps when installing Alfresco in a production environment is changing settings within the Alfresco configuration in order to improve system performance. This type of configuration is commonly referred to as “Day Zero” configuration. This post will briefly touch on some of the key components of Alfresco day zero configuration and provide links with additional information for performing day zero configuration. ... [Continue Reading]
Content Deletion in Alfresco – More than Meets the Eye
An important and often overlooked component of implementing a content management system is the lifecycle of content once it has been deleted in the repository. There are a number of things to consider when coming up with a plan for deleting content, including recoverability, performance, and system resource usage. This article outlines the way that Alfresco handles content deletion and will hopefully bring to light some key decision points that are often ignored during the initial ... [Continue Reading]
Documentum – Understanding DQL’s Performance Limitation with xPlore
Retrieving data from a Documentum Repository using DQL is a common and robust process with Documentum. With addition of the xPlore search engine, there are some challenges that experienced DQL users may find unique. This post will discuss our experience with DQL and xPlore. ... [Continue Reading]
Alfresco Data List-Driven Value Assistance
Although content modeling in Alfresco is very flexible and configurable, one of the issues that we run into when setting up repositories for clients is the lack of the ability for business users to manage value assistance lists. Value assistance is a term that we use to describe the lists of options that show up in dropdown and multi-select controls in the user interface on the edit properties and search screens. This post will describe a module that we’ve developed to utilize the data list ... [Continue Reading]
Customize User Management Columns in Webtop's Administration Node
Documentum’s out of box Webtop allows for its administrative users to manage groups, and the users that belong to each group, while within Webtop’s user management section. As a default, the groups and its users are presented in a datagrid along with individual descriptions, if provided. Sometimes, however, clients will find it useful to expose additional user information on the datagrid (such as an email) to accompany the name and description columns already implemented. Such a task is ... [Continue Reading]
Debugging Documentum Java Method Server (JMS) Code in Eclipse
One of the big challenges with working with Documentum is debugging code that is deployed to the Content Server’s Java Method Server (JMS). Deploying code updates to the JMS can be tedious because it the JMS is typically on a remote server for developers, and it usually takes a long time to restart when code changes are deployed. The Java Method Server is also shared by all repositories on the content server, so continuously restarting the server for debugging can impact other repositories. ... [Continue Reading]
ECM Collaboration & Consumerization of IT – Thoughts and ramblings
Four of us are out at the Alfresco Developer conference in San Diego this week. Look for a write-up on DevCon later this week. This post will present a number of thoughts gleaned from multiple discussions over drinks with other Alfresco partners regarding collaboration and ECM. ... [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]
Lifecycle Performance: Could DEVRANDOM be causing a problem?
Documentum lifecycles are time consuming functions since they require a call out to the Java Method Server to perform their actions. We recently ran into an issue on a project where the lifecycle actions were taking an inordinate amount of time. We did some investigation along with our client and discovered an OS setting in Linux that was impacting performance, DEVRANDOM. ... [Continue Reading]
Documentum Search Application Performance Tuning – Part 1
Typically Documentum users will have heard Ed speak at Momentum or EMC World in the past in regards to system performance and Documentum. For this post, we are going to take a different approach and talk about Documentum Search APPLICATION Tuning for system and USER performance. All of the concepts relate to our Alfresco and SharePoint clients as well as the Documentum users. The experience is based on a recent client but we will try to bring in best practices from other clients as well. ... [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]
Flex Applications and Security Constraints
To give an update on the Active Wizard Enhancements we were working on last month, we recently finished up all development and testing of the Flex-based checkin/checkout interface against Documentum. We delivered to our client this week, but I wanted to share some of the challenges we ran into, specifically related to running an application using Flash. ... [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]
Documentum Upgrade: Impact on e-Signatures
As TSG continues to help clients upgrade their Documentum environments to 6.5, support for e-Signatures has required special attention on several of our projects. We thought we'd share a few of our lessons learned below. Lesson Learned #1: Customization is Required to Support e-Signatures on Linux and HP-UX Platforms e-Signatures are NOT supported by EMC on Linux and HP-UX platforms - a serious limitation for many customers. The good news is that it is only the manifestation of the PDF ... [Continue Reading]
