“The system is slow” can be an irritating and often unfounded user complaint about Alfresco or Documentum. To address user concerns, Alfresco or Documentum support resources have to often become detectives and ask questions like “what were you doing, which documents, what time, from what machine….” to try and diagnose the background of the complaint. Users can get frustrated as typically the compliant represents an overall feeling rather than any exact action or time. This post will present ... [Continue Reading]
Video and Audio Annotations – New Functionality in OpenAnnotate
TSG has just finished our latest addition to OpenAnnotate to support annotations of various file formats including mp4 (video) and wav/mp3/aac (audio). This post will present our approach as well as a short video demonstration. ... [Continue Reading]
Workshare Compare for More Efficient Review and Approval of Document Changes
We have recently been working with multiple clients that have streamlined their review and approval process to increase throughput and decrease turnaround time. One key process improvement is allowing for quick and simple annotations during the review cycle. TSG's OpenAnnotate provides for quick, browser based annotations and now includes Workshare Compare integration as well. This post will present how OpenAnnotate combined with Workshare Compare can be used to further streamline the process ... [Continue Reading]
Office 365 – Check-in and Check-out with Documentum, Alfresco or Hadoop
One of the major issues for authors with Documentum, Alfresco or Hadoop has always been checking in a document from a browser based interface. We have recently completed adding Office 365 integration to our High Performance Interface (HPI) to allow clients to checkin and checkout without requiring Office on their device. This post will share the approach as well as present a video of the capabilities. ... [Continue Reading]
EMC said planning to sell Documentum Business Amid Dell Deal – (Bloomberg)
Bloomberg reported yesterday that EMC is seeking to sell Documentum. As we have been reporting here when the Dell deal was initially announced, as well as when Dell announced the sale of their information-technology services business to NTT Data Corp (formerly Perot Services), we have predicted that Dell will look to sell off non-strategic components to reduce the debt burden. Bloomberg surmises that "a private equity firm will probably acquire it, though a sale won't happen quickly". Full ... [Continue Reading]
Documentum D2 – Announcing OpenAnnotate Support
TSG is happy to announce our new Documentum D2 plugin that allows Documentum D2 users to leverage OpenAnnotate for their PDF annotation needs. OpenAnnotate is a next generation web based annotation tool (no client side components) that allows users to quickly create rich annotations on a PDF document or rendition. ... [Continue Reading]
Documentum or Alfresco – TSG Government Solution
In the past few years TSG has added several government clients to our solution portfolio. Building on this work we have developed a Government Solution focusing on the case management strengths of HPI and the document review and approval capability of Active Wizard. This post will present our plan for our Government Solutions posts. ... [Continue Reading]
Documentum / IIG / ECD? – EMC Announces 2014 Earnings, Layoffs and thoughts on a spin-off
EMC released it's 2014 financial results yesterday. Included with the announcements was news of layoffs for 2015. In a separate discussion at an IIG partner kickoff, IIG – the Information Intelligence Group, is changing it’s name to Enterprise Content Division – ECD as well as it’s leader. This post will present thoughts on all of these changes. ... [Continue Reading]
Documentum and Alfresco – What are some of the bigger differences?
Many of the more popular posts over the years have been surrounding Migrating from Documentum to Alfresco and other comparison posts. While some of the differences are obvious (Big Public Company/Division of EMC versus Private Company, 20+ Years old versus 10 Years Old.....), for this post, we thought we would summarize some of the not so obvious differences for clients considering migrating from Documentum to Alfresco from both a technology and culture perspective. ... [Continue Reading]
Ephesoft Partnership
Technology Services Group is excited to announce a new partnership with Ephesoft, maker of SmartCapture, an industry leader specializing in extracting critical information from physical and electronic documents. From scanned forms to faxes to PDFs, emails and attachement, Ephesoft provides the capabilities to tag, process, organize, and add properties to documents through a highly configurable batch processing system. TSG is adding Ephesoft as another alternative and component in an overall ... [Continue Reading]
Alfresco or Documentum Collaborative Document Reviews with OpenAnnotate
Whenever we give a demo of OpenAnnotate, clients always ask, "What happens when multiple users need to review a document at the same time?" OpenAnnotate has always supported having multiple users annotating a document at the same time, but a recent client has added functionality which broadcasts "live" the annotations and comments that users are making. This makes the review process in OpenAnnotate more collaborative. This post will outline some things to look for when evaluating your options ... [Continue Reading]
HPI Edit Online – Save directly into Documentum or Alfresco Repository from Microsoft Word
We often hear from our clients that the process of changing a document requires too many steps. TSG has added a new feature to the HPI product that allows users to seamlessly edit their documents in one simple step. ... [Continue Reading]
Documentum or Alfresco – Redacting Sensitive Information with OpenRedact
As more business processes are being automated for storing and working with documents in ECM repositories, many companies are encountering a need to redact sensitive information in these documents. Solutions exist for doing the redaction such as Brava and Redact-it, but these solutions are expensive and difficult to support. TSG is proud to introduce OpenRedact, an open source web-based redaction tool for redacting sensitive information on documents stored in Documentum or Alfresco. ... [Continue Reading]
Documentum & Alfresco Migration Strategies – What Factors Should be Considered?
As we’ve mentioned in a previous blog post, we often meet with potential clients who are interested in using OpenMigrate to meet a migration need but they haven’t yet identified specific migration requirements beyond the need to move documents from one location to another. It is important to identify requirements and an overall migration strategy as early as possible as migrations provide a great opportunity to “clean up” content management systems. This “cleansing” can be through object model ... [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]
Integrating Alfresco or Documentum with a Learning Management System (LMS)
When presenting TSG’s HPI based Quality Document Management solution to a regulated industry (Life Sciences, Energy, etc.), we often get asked about training requirements. The question is typically asked in one of the following ways: Does HPI support Read & Understood Notifications and tracking? Does HPI have Distribution functionality? Can HPI integrate with a Learning Management System (LMS)? ... [Continue Reading]
Enhancing Alfresco Share with HPI 2.1 – Summary of Series Posting
In preparation for our webinar with Alfresco on February 11th (recording has been posted) on how to enhance or extend Alfresco Share with HPI 2.1. This post is the summary of a series of posts on how HPI 2.1 can work with Share. ... [Continue Reading]
GKC ARMA Panel Recap – Emerging ECM Trends
I attended the January ARMA meeting as a panelist to discuss the trends TSG sees emerging in the ECM space and how they relate to the records and information (RIM) practice. This post will recap and highlight the discussion. ... [Continue Reading]
Documentum – Upgrading to Documentum 7 in Three Weeks
Many of our clients have end of year deadlines for projects. One of our newest clients contacted us with an unprecedented challenge – could we upgrade them from 32-bit Documentum 6.5 SP1 to 64-bit Documentum 7.0 Patch 12 by early December given availability of certain funds. This post will present the project and some best practices in regards to the upgrade. ... [Continue Reading]
Documentum and Alfresco – Web-based Scanning in HPI
Forget scanning to your desktop or file server, HPI has a new integration with Dynamsoft’s Image Capture Suite and OCR products. Now you can scan single documents directly into your Alfresco or Documentum repository. This capability moves the point of document capture closer to the point of document creation and entry into a business process. Letters, signed documents, and supporting paper documents can now be captured much faster and easier. ... [Continue Reading]
Web Content Curating and Publishing (WCM) in Documentum and Alfresco
After upgrading Alfresco for one of our financial clients, we started looking at how to improve the tools and process they use to manage web content for multiple external sites. Beginning with an informal survey of how our other customers curate and publish web content it became apparent that each one handles it slightly different. This post will summarize seven different clients and how they are adding, reviewing, approving, and publishing information to the web. ... [Continue Reading]
Documentum Upgrade – Replacing the PIA (Primary Interop Assembly) with OpenSearch
Last week we updated a client’s .NET application to replace Documentum’s defunct PIA (Primary Interop Assembly) API with calls to OpenSearch through HPI. This client’s HPI instance is an offline content viewer portal that utilizes Solr for searching and serving documents. The .NET code change was minimal, simply replacing the PIA calls with OpenSearch calls effectively changing the source of where the application gets its documents from Documentum to Solr. Decoupling the .NET application from ... [Continue Reading]
Organizing Documents for Easy Management
While working with a couple of clients recently the question of how best to organize documents in their ECM systems came up. Both had started organizing documents by department but then realized for the long-term that organizing by document type worked better. While no one-way of organizing information may fit every ECM implementation this post will share a few guidelines and best practices that make the long-term management of information a bit easier. ... [Continue Reading]
Documentum Workflow Reporting: One Client’s Approach using Cognos
Many of our clients deploy some type of business workflow as a part of their ECM offering and see some great efficiency improvements. This entry is going to outline how a large Pharmaceutical client was able to create some advanced reporting around their promotional materials approval process to help identify inefficiencies in their process and improve their workflow turnaround time. The client uses TSG’s Active Wizard dynamic workflow engine to drive their approval process of promotional and ... [Continue Reading]
ECM Ownership at Successful Organizations
While working on a 2012 roadmap and strategy for a client, I was asked “How do successful organizations deploy and manage ECM systems?” Since it’s a question worth some thought, I took the opportunity to conduct an informal survey of TSG account managers. What follows are observations about what we see working at clients when it comes to making ECM decisions and getting things done. ... [Continue Reading]
