EMC Documentum D6 Techset – Munich 2007

Sooo, we received the invites. Soooo, we registered and payed the fees (let’s make things clear – we are partners of EMC). Sooo, we received an e-mail from someone saying “Hey, four people, that’s a lot, space is limited, kick sombody out”. Of course we didn’t do that. We paid for it, we need it, we stood up for it. And we left for Munchen at 17:00 on October 14th. Here’s how it went…

Everything took place in Wappenhalle, somewhere in Konrad-Zuse-Platz in Munchen. It’s easy to get there, just take the U2 from whatever station to Messestadt West and you’re there. This is what we didn’t do on Monday morning. We took the S-Bahn to Riem, which left us pretty far away. It was a nice walk though .

The first day featured presentations of John McCormick (VP, Product Management for Content Management and Archiving) and Victor Spivak (Chief Architect for Content Management and Archiving) – of course there were other small intermissions from other people but those two I remember . Let’s unleash some news:

• From architectural point of view the first major upgrade in Documentum 6 is the improvement of the Branch Office Caching Services – BOCS. This product now supports async-write, which greatly improves the applications’ response times. Accelerated Content Services (ACS) also suffered an upgrade, through which it now supports writting to it as opposed to “read-only” in D5.
• From the developer’s point of view there are some major improvements:
  • First, the Documentum Foundation Services – DFS. These services allow developers to write ECM applications using Documentum platform without the use of DFC. This means that one can use simple web-services API to access Documentum services like check-in/check-out, object creation, security management etc. Of course EMC recommends that we should use their “client library” (available for Java or .Net) in order to access those services.
  • The second major improvement in Documentum development are the “Aspects”. Please do not confuse this with “Java Aspects”. Documentum aspects is a different story. To make it short: while a TBO (type based object) is based on an object type, an aspect is based on the object itself. It significantly improves the architecture of you applications, allowing the developers to apply business logic selectively on their objects.
  • The third major change (notice the change of terms ) is that DQL is now BOF-aware. In other words, when you run an update query it will trigger the eventual TBOs registered on the item-type which you query. Bad news for people who used to fix problems through the back-door
• From the client side there are some changes in the WDK – you can now modify the settings of a component without having to rewrite the whole xml in the “custom” folder of your webapp.
• Documentum Composer – well, that’s a treat. Finally they get rid of the Documentum Application Builder and Application Installer. Composer it’s an Eclipse based tool which merges the functionalities of the aforementioned tools. Being based on the popular IDE it also features some neat things like templating the TBO classes or inplace editing of the TBO and aspect classes. Another interesting thing is the support for source control systems like Subversion or CVS.
• There is a new product called Task Space. Johnny Gee has some insights of that, i didn’t attend that presentation. Some people say “Webtop killer” I say “no way”. It has a totally different target audience.
• Webtop has some changes – contextual menus are the first to notice. No more check-boxes, now all data-grids support row selection. They event claim to have AJAX, and they really do: remember the object name ? That field is AJAX-enabled. It autocompletes with the name previously entered in that field. Didn’t figure how this can be useful to me, but it’s a nice thing to reverse-engineer .

Overall impression: quick conclusion – very strong on the core side, sucks on the client side. It seems to me that Documentum development teams do not communicate at all. There are changes in the core functionalities which do not reflect on the client-side. Take for example the aspects: they have the data model, they have the DFC API but absolutely no aspects related functionality in Webtop of WDK, which seems plain stupid to me.

DFS is a very nice concept (enables EMC to say they now have “SOA“). It’s meant to replace the DFC as the official API, the only problem is they say you do not have to learn DFC anymore, so it’s easier. On the other hand, you have to learn the client API (they are “highly” recommending it) so I don’t see how that’s easier for a developer. Oh yeah, it’s Documentum agnostic, but I don’t know of any Enterprise Content Management platforms that support that API.

Although the current (and very recent) release is 6.0, service pack 1 has been announced for December and all overviews were full of answers and statements like “it’s coming in SP1″ or, worse, “it’s coming in 6.5″ (6.5 is expected somewhere around july 2008). Seems that you have to to test on the 6.0 and deploy on 6.0 SP1.

Oh, and another thing. I estimated around 300 – 400 participants. I think only a quarter or less of those were partners. (based on a random “How many of you are partners” question in an overview session on the first day). The others were EMC consultants

This is all I can think of right now. I have some pictures, I’ll make a Flickr gallery out of them as soon as I finish sorting, renaming etc.