Watch for a spike, because I’m about to forward this link to the whole xCP product management list.

And while I do appreciate each and every suggestion, I also think someone should acknowledge the genius you showed when choosing a graphic for the post (maybe we just need to hire some engineers from Pacific Tech!).

Scrap seat-based licensing. It just makes integration a painful exercise. For example, you need to purchase licenses for custom dfc clients – this is in addition to webtop, etc – absolutely ridiculous. Just base licensing on server products – price per cpu/core or similar.

On an ECM project a couple of years ago, the implementation team just about gave up on DCTM due to licensing, not the technology (bpm, custom portlets, webtop, etc). We would’ve gone with Alfresco if it wasn’t for the fact DCTM was already in place and this investment had to be justified.

Its amazing that ECM have not led with a cloud based offering yet but perhaps the complexity of the DCTM architecture is an obstacle. I would really like to see the improvements being made to installation/configuration. Make it simple, quicker (it’s sooo slow), scriptable.

Open the APIs (they’re useless with Content Server anyway), let paying customers see the code. Something a bit simpler – list the product dependencies so that we can build solutions using Maven.

Most DQL problems aren’t anything that indexes or common sense can’t take care of for Documentum. I’m running 35 million objects in one SQL Server repository with no issues, at least not database related. I view moving to Oracle as a cop-out by EMC.

Happy Holidays to you. Get yourself to AIIM this year.

However, it is important to keep on them until it is done. This is a need that will only grow.

How much do you want to bet that they’ll try and charge clients extra for the right to deploy to the cloud?

Good ideas and I certainly support you on all of them.

Keeping with your theme, my gift to EMC is the requirement and the importance to move fast with the Documentum architecture model and licensing to accommodate the cloud (virtual) pricing and deployment model.

In a simple cloud offering model, beside the simple basic system installation, it offers a temporary provisioning one of two ways, the dynamic allocation of temporary resources on the same virtual environment (CPU, MEM, Storage, etc …) or the instantiation of same environments over a specific period of time.

Recently, I attempted to create a proof of concept for these two scenarios on a private cloud for most of DCTM common components (app server, DM, ACS, etc …..). For now I can report even without jumping into the licensing dilemma, the architectural deployment was neither easy nor fun. In my view it was not even successful but this is a topic for another day.

Happy Holidays everyone and EMC too!

Walid

I realy hope that anyone at EMC reading this will not blow this off, but recognize that these are core pain points for users.

1. Pay an english speaking “English” major to review and proofread your documentation and support notes on Powerlink. Isn’t about time you made your documentation as a wiki? This was suggested years ago by Craig, but alas, he is no longer with the company.

2. Documentum Administrator needs some polish. Why when rectivating a deactivated user do I have to go back into the user acoount a second time to enable workflow? Little things like this drive adminsitrators crazy. What should be a 3 click process is 6 clicks.

3. Reporting. Really? You charge extra to give me a reporting interface.

There are many more, but those are the first 3 that come to mind.

Happy Holidays from Canada !

So playing devils advocate, from the mega-super-corp point of view, why would they want to change their licensing and charging models ? There is almost a de facto opinion in the market place – if your big and your doing complex ECM you don’t mind paying for EMC / IBM / OpenText (maybe Oracle). If your not, and budget is an issue then maybe its SharePoint or one of the other (much better) mid-level platforms, or Alfresco if you want open source. By the way, I am not defending or vindicating this point of view.

I also agree with your point ref DQL – I have seen Documentum grind to a complete half on what should have been simple metadata manipulation, and we had both EMC and MS looking at it – in the end we had to move to Oracle to get decent performance !

1) That would be great. I wouldn’t mind a simpler version included with a bells-and-whistle version for a per-server cost.
2) I’d like to see it from the file system. Advanced stuff should be a simple price. 50K, use forever and as often.
3) HERE HERE!!! Damn straight!
4) It isn’t that hard of a feature. I wish they would make it standard.

Let’s keep in mind that they need to make some money. Great thoughts.

1. Logical backup and recovery (file, directory, user), i.e. think CYA.
2. High performance Import and Export tools for bulk load / transfer with meta data support and transformation.
3. Better utilities for repository moves / renames (installation owner change, SQL / Oracle moves, prod -> test replication, AEK changes).
4. Recycle bin in repository.

James