EMC Redoubles Documentum

EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) has overhauled its line of content management products bearing the Documentum brand, claiming substantial improvements in efficiency, along with a range of new capabilities (see EMC Launches Massive Documentum Upgrade).

EMC offers heaps of information about the upgrade, but one of the key features is what the vendor calls "unification" of the underlying processes on which Documentum applications are based. "This announcement is about a fully unified platform, no more separate silos. All Documentum applications share one architecture," says Lubor Ptacek, EMC's diretor of product marketing for the Documentum line. "You don't have to go into three different places to set up users, security, user interfaces, and so on."

Hey, wasn't EMC claiming integration before this? Yes, Ptacek says, it was. But that's different from unification. Up to now, each Documentum application (content distribution, searching, print control, compliance management, etc.) had its own code base, repository of user information, security data, object model, and audit trail. Documentum applications were integrated, meaning they could interoperate, but IT managers still had to maintain separate data for each one, usually on separate hosts.

EMC released a collaboration program called eRoom, which it adapted to the Internet back in June 2004 (see Documentum Delivers eRoom.net). But eRoom lived separately from other Documentum apps. Now, Ptacek notes, the features of eRoom are integrated into each Documentum application.

A bunch of Documentum Business Process applications build on the new underpinnings to streamline business processes such as order entry, invoice processing, design collaboration, and the like.