Documentum Targets Publishers With Quark, InDesign Integration

The Documentum Enterprise Publishing Solution, which the company bills as an end-to-end solution for multichannel publishing, could accelerate the vendor's existing penetration in the textbook and scholastic publishing market and give it traction with catalog and magazine publishers over the next year, said Tony Freeman, executive vice president of DeepBridge, a New York-based publishing systems integrator.

"It's a wonderful play for them in the publishing market," Freeman said. "From the point of view of a publishing integrator, we've always wanted that big mother ship on the back end that we could tie into, which is the Documentum foundation technologies--the workflow, the [digital asset management], the XML handling, the Web content management system."

DeepBridge began working with Documentum about a year and half ago after it rolled out its digital asset management technology, acquired with the Bulldog Group in December 2001. Digital asset management provides the ability to manage photographs, video and other complex, rich media files.

Documentum began making some headway in the publishing industry about six months ago with the full integration of the technology and addition of Macintosh compatibility with its Documentum 5 platform, said Mark Arbour, director of product marketing at Documentum, Pleasanton, Calif.

But the key to the new release is the inclusion of what Documentum calls Authoring Integration Services, or AIS, which enables the system to seamlessly integrate with what Arbour said were "hundreds of content creation tools."

Files from such applications as Quark QPS, Adobe InDesign, Arbortext, Adobe Illustrator and other tools widely used in the publishing world can now be automatically routed to the Documentum repository as they are saved to a hard drive from the applications, avoiding the need to separately import them into the system.

"We've been working on Authoring Integration Services for the last nine months. That was the gap we had," Arbour said.

Other modules in the stack include Content Intelligence Services for automatically tagging and categorizing content; the eRoom collaboration software; Media Services for transforming images and files into different formats and resolutions; Content Distribution Services for managing subscriptions; Content Server for workflow, XML and multilingual content management; and Web Publisher for managing Web content.

Arbour said the software will start at about $150,000 for 100 users and scale up from there based on the components deployed and number of users. He said publishers can start out buying some of the components and add other capabilities as they go.

Documentum may face its toughest competition in the publishing industry from Interwoven and Vignette, Freeman said. Interwoven acquired digital asset management vendor MediaBin earlier this year and has had a strategic relationship with Artesia Technologies, a stand-alone digital asset management vendor that, some speculate, could be a possible acquisition target. Vignette is one of the company's investors.

"Interwoven has great technology, but one thing that distinguishes Documentum is that Documentum [software] is more scalable and has more robust XML handling," Freeman said.

Stellent, another enterprise content management vendor, on Monday said it was acquiring Ancept, a Minneapolis-based solution provider, for its digital asset management technology. IBM is also a leading vendor in the digital asset and enterprise content management arena.