In the last month, I attended two Documentum User Group meetings.  They were very different experiences, beneficial in different ways.  The NY group was fun and was a chance to talk to lots of different users

I am going to do something slightly different this post, I’m going to focus on the positives. Let’s see how that works.

Razmik Grants a Vision of Documentum’s Future

The New York user group was simply awesome. That is not to say that it was perfect or the best I had ever attended.  What made it so good was the level of interaction of, get this, the USERS of Documentum. The presentations in NY weren’t bad either.

Razmik, the VP and CTO of the CMA Division of EMC (Documentum), gave the keynote.  It was very similar to the keynote delivered by Mark Lewis in Orlando, but the message was more evolved.  The important topic within the presentation was Master Content Management, what I have previously referred to Skynet.

The term isn’t as evil as it sounds, or at least, EMC isn’t to blame for it.  In the world of structured data, there is the concept of Master Data Management. MDM is the management of all data in an organization, even when the information is distributed in multiple systems.

Let’s translate this to content. Managing all content in an organization from one central location.  This can be done through a virtual repository or in a federated manor.  The point is that content is managed in-place from a central, controlling, application.

So how does this work? This is where CMIS comes into play. If you can talk to any repository without having to configure a connector or trying to determine the proper API, then you can act as the Master Content Repository.

This is assuming, of course, that the “in-place” repository has the capabilities to perform what is needed. Take eDiscovery. All these great tools for finding content, but what happens when you find something relevant? You have to place a Hold on it.  Well, not every system can support that, so you have to ingest the content into one that does. If the system can support Holds, you can just place a Hold on the content right then and there. Welcome to Skynet.

There are still some other problems to be worked out, like mapping the metadata between systems, and leveraging that through CMIS. It is a vision, and it is something that you can point at as a direction. Is it the right one? Time will tell.

After all of the presentations, there was an experts panel, that included Razmik. I just want to personally thank Razmik for participating. It was nice to see him try and answer every question without avoidance. He was a good sport and I think we all came away feeling a little better.

A Day in the Life of the DC User Group

The DC group is different. It is a user group that suffers from lower “user” participation.  There are no case studies and the expert panel consists of integrators.  To be fair, for many federal agencies, the Documentum expert is an integrator.  The result is that it feels more like an EMC event than a user group.

Of course, no dynamic presentations were given at the user group.  xCP was presented, but being the biggest push by EMC in recent months, very little new was presented.  I would direct you to Lee Smith’s post on xCP from Momentum Athens for insight as to what the future holds in that department.

On the plus side, I know just about everyone at the DC meeting.  It is usually a time to trade war stories and discuss our latest pains with Documentum. Still, I’d rather meet new people and hear about new solutions that people are implementing.

Remember, the user groups are only as good as the number users that attend and participate. So please support your local user group. I promise you will get something useful out of it.