Documentum Composer

Documentum Renewal: Focus on the Core

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I just started writing a series on what EMC should do with their Documentum product as part of my Christmas gift to EMC. That part is key…this is a gift from the community because we want Documentum to be better and to stick around.

Why do I say the community? Simple enough…because I hear these things from many users at different installations across multiple verticals. I hear things from clients, partners, competitors, and random people at meetings.

We criticize because we care.

That being said, my first post in this series, on Application Separation, had a great reply from Lee Smith which is worth looking at.  Take a moment.

Today we are looking at the Content Server, the engine that makes everything work.

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Tip: Identifying Documentum Object Types

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Last month, I ran into an error.  You know the type, vague, irritating, and an r_object_id that I didn’t recognize. (Okay, I never “recognize” an id given the complexity, but usually I can figure things out from the first two digits.)  The error basically said that the r_object_id “53…” did not exist.

Anyway, a quick look didn’t reveal anything. I determined that it wasn’t derived by dm_sysobject by doing a quick query on the table. I decided to throw the question out to Twitter and see what happened.

Okay fearless #Documentum hackers, what object type begins its r_object_id with a ’53’?

I got two replies, one from Lee Dallas (@ldallasBMOC) and another from David Matheson (@davidfmatheson).

@piewords #Documentum 53 is dm_literal_expr – if you are asking-you need to run data dictionary publish,clear caches restart app svrs

@piewords #Documentum @ldallasBMOC beat me to it, I would add you can check IDfId for the full list of what’s what in any version of DFC.

So Lee gave me the fix, which had already been executed, but he told me why the restart of the client application worked. (The Data Dictionary runs regularly in our environment, so it had already run). David taught me how to answer the question in the future.  I also found another way to make the determination as well.  I’m going to share them both now.

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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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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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D6 Observations, Part I

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This is a first of a sequence of posts of things that I notice as I downloaded the new release last night.

  • Time to stop putting off those upgrades. D6 doesn’t support SQL Server 2000 any more. Your development boxes need to be upgraded as well since Windows 2000 is officially on the scrap pile. In general, not a lot of supported platforms. Upgrading your Content Server to 5.3 sp5 as an intermediate step in order to upgrade all your 3rd party components may have just gone from being a good idea to a required step.
  • Content Server still C++ has for the application. Fabian was correct. The DMCL API, the old C++ foundation for all applications, is now part of the Java DFC. A copy of the DMCL will still be provided for legacy support, but no new features are to be provided.

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