D6.5

Stage 1 Complete, Documentum Helps Developers

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I’ve been meaning to talk about the new Documentum Developer Edition for a while now.  I’ve referred to it in previous posts and twittered about it.  More recently, Marko over at Big Men on Content has talked about the benefits of freely available ECM platforms for development and proof-of-concepts.  I thought some spare vacation time, and the release of the 6.5 sp2 version, was a perfect time to write-up my thoughts.

To start with, ABOUT TIME!!! Okay, that may be a little strong, but in the age of open source and when Microsoft and Oracle have been offering developer editions of their core products for years this was way overdue.  If you want the developer pool to grow, which is one of the major costs of a large-scale deployment, you need to allow them to use the tools.  There are lots of independent consultants out there that have trouble keeping-up with the technology because they can’t afford to become partners for the requisite fee.  The Developer Edition makes it easier on them (and harder on me, but that is another post) to deliver into the market.

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EMC World 2009: Deep Dive with Content Services for SharePoint

Erin Samuels is going to be presenting on the other half of the SharePoint offering.  Andrew was going to speak, but everyone voted against it due to the potential lawsuit after the abuse he doled out yesterday. He is present and will probably speak despite our best efforts.

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EMC World 2009: Beyond D6.5, A Product Roadmap

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This is being presented by Frank Chao this morning.  It is a third day, 8am session, by design. This is typically a useful session that I prefer to see on the first day so I can better plan my conference, but they probably figure that attendance is lower so less people will hear it. This session’s slides are almost never published, so this is a can’t miss.

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EMC World 2009: Documentum ECM 6.5 Architecture Overview

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Victor Spivak, chief architect for the platform, is presenting on what is the most popular topic post from last year. Victor is smart and doesn’t mince words.  The session was mostly packed 15 minutes before it even started.

Victor is going to breeze through many of the things that haven’t changed in a year, so supplement these notes with last year’s notes.  These notes are “more accurate” if they conflict.

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EMC World 2009: Documentum Foundation Services (DFS) – Best Practices and Real World Examples

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One of my most popular session notes from last year returns for a sequel. Not a bad way to start the conference. Let’s see if Michael (MT) Mohen of EMC Professional Services can deliver on their promise to provide us with lots of new material…

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Documentum and LDAP, Time to Grow Up

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[Edit: See Comments for details on the “Why” of the edits.]

I’ve spent the last several weeks working on LDAP issues.  Some have been simple, others, not so much.  Suffice it to say, if you have Documentum 6.0 sp1, get the hot fixes for LDAP.  They are readily available from EMC.  Most of these are rolled up into D6.5 sp1.

Those issues aren’t isn’t what I want to talk about today. What I want to talk about is the advent of large systems and the need for applications, like Documentum, to accommodate the broader reality of some of today’s environments.

Before I go much deeper, I want to state that some vendors handle this worse than EMC, and some handle it better.  I’m not going to name names.  I do know at least one major player that does a much worse job, and I am pretty sure I can accurately pick one that handles it better.

ALL vendors need to understand this problem.

Enter the Multi-Domain Enterprise

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My Journey from DocApp to DAR

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A year ago, I tried Composer when my first project began to upgrade to D6. Without going into too much detail, it sucked. I loaded my DocApp and Composer completely rejected it.  After a couple of days, I gave up. If I had been creating a new application, maybe it would have been fine, but I wasn’t. After talking to David Louie, I sent the DocApp in question to EMC and got the report, “it works in the new version”. Well, it was too late and I wasn’t changing my developer’s environment mid-process.

Now that project is progressing down the D6.5 path. I thought I would try again, and document the process for everyone.

I’m writing this post “live”.  Which means I won’t post it live, but I won’t edit the post to disguise steps and my thoughts as I try things.

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Documentum’s High Volume Server, 6.5sp1 Edition

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One of the highlights of the D6.5 release was the new features around enabling high volumes of content in the repository.  There are two standard problems around storing lots and lots of content in an ECM system.

  1. Every object in an ECM system has overhead.  In Documentum, it is takes 2-3K in database storage per object.  That can add up quick.  Just think of the emails in your organization or the images that a financial institution might generate from scanned documents.
  2. The very act of adding content into the Content Server takes several round trips to the database.  Is this a valid ACL to assign?  Does the containing folder exist?  Those are just two of the questions asked during the process.

After learning about these features in more detail, in discussions with Victor (See a recording of his presentation on the Developer Network) and Ed, at EMC World 2008, I started making plans to use it on one of my projects.  I later learned that there is a catch.  Before we get to the catch, let’s review the highlights.

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Documentum 6.5 is Released

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Just so you know, last night I saw the first bits of D6.5 on the download site. The entire core stack is out. If you are a partner, you may not see some components as they are fixing some of the entitlements. I expect that to be fixed quickly. [Edit 8/5/2008: Fixed.] Share and enjoy.

Also, D7 is slated for Q4 2009. This is on schedule for 18 months after D6.5, as their strategy for releases dictates.

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D6.5 Release Information

According to Whitney Tidmarsh’s talk today, D6.5 is slated for the end of July.  An official announcement should be coming next week.

What does this mean?  It should be on the download site by the second week in August.  The download site is run by a 3rd party, so sometimes it takes a bit to get everything updated.

If you work with your account rep, you can make sure that you get it on the actual release date.