IBM Rewrites Enterprise Content Management Software

IBM

"It's the most major rewrite this product has ever had. We've been waiting for this for years," said partner Jeff Strombert, president of Ancept, Minneapolis, which integrates digital asset management solutions on the IBM Content Manager platform.

Strombert said one of the key strengths of IBM Content Manager version 8 is that it can handle all types of rich media out of the box. He also said it its four to five times faster than previous versions and can handle much larger volumes of data.

IBM plans to release the new version in September with a price of $24,000 per processor and $2,000 per concurrent user.

IBM introduced a new set of simplified APIs with the upgrade as well as a larger set of objects and wizards that should enable partners to build applications 30 percent faster, said Bret MacIntyre, IBM vice president of content management. The software also comes with software for rapid development of browser-based as well as Windows-based clients.

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"We made an investment in really reducing the time it takes to produce applications," MacIntyre said.

MacIntrye said another new feature of Content Manager is what he called federated data management, which makes it easier for companies to search and retrieve content housed in various repositories, including Documentum, FileNet and Lotus Notes repositories, and obtain one virtual view of content across an enterprise. "We'll do search and retrieval as one system," he said.

IBM also added enhancements to make the system easier to administer, such as LDAP integration for single logon and Java tools for carrying out administrative tasks through a browser. The software also takes advantage of functionality in IBM's DB2 database for self-optimizing and self-tuning the database.

Finally, the federated data management and elimination of bottlenecks within the metadata server make the new Content Manager faster and more scalable. He said IBM is seeing requirements from customers to manage larger and larger amounts of content with a single system.