EMC's Documentum Ties Together Its Architecture With 50 New Products
Announced Monday, the new wave of products unifies content services, process services, and repository services around a single architecture. Documentum seemed to miss nothing in the announcement, covering everything from single-point user access for all content searches to team rooms for discussions. One feature--Documentum Outlook Client--enables users to save e-mail in the ECM repository with the same look-and-feel as Outlook.
"Customers across the globe have come to realize the functional and financial limitations of architectures that mask loosely integrated applications with a seemingly united single interface," said Dave DeWalt, executive vice president of EMC Software, in a statement. "EMC has ... a unified repository and set of services that is completely accessible by the masses of applications, desktops, and systems that are spread across an enterprise."
The new architecture's products enable many popular repositories--including FileNet, OpenText, and SAP--to be searched via single-point user access. A new product, EMC Documentum Collaboration Services, enables the use of native discussions, notes, and contextual folders to be carried out in workspaces called "rooms." The company said: "This adds a new dimension of team innovation and effectiveness in all Documentum clients and applications such as EMC Documentum Webtop, EMC Documentum Digital Asset Manager and EMC Documentum Web Publisher."
The surge of products was hailed by the Sageza Group, which said Documentum's enterprise customers are likely to be pleased with the Documentum 5.3.
"Documentum has taken a major step forward in helping enterprise remedy the content, process and repository dilemma by unifying the functionalities under the Documentum service architecture with open API's for the integration of third party products," Sageza said in an e-mail. "Each component of this announcement has a discrete value proposition."
The market research firm, however, cautioned that smaller and mid-sized firms are likely to find the sweeping products and services in Documentum 5.3 "still too fuzzy, abstract, and academic." Sageza speculated that EMC Documentum is likely at a later date to introduce additional services and products that will continue to tie the architecture together.