March 23, 2005

Documentum, the ECM (enterprise content management) firm acquired by data storage company EMC in 2003, has re-emerged as EMC Documentum, and now it has released a new version of its ECM platform.

The platform is notable for the addition of numerous new functionality, all of which connects back to existing tools via an integrated architecture that, according to EMC, has "a common code base, security model, repository, object model and API."

Here's some of what's new:

1) Federated Search: A way to conduct searches across Documentum as well as repositories from SAP, File Net, and Open Text.

2) EMC Documentum Client for Outlook: Users can work within Microsoft Outlook while saving e-mail and attachments in Documentum, which has even designed its folders to resemble and behave like Outlook folders.

3) EMC Documentum Content Transformation Services: A way to turn common documents into different formats.

4) EMC Documentum Collaboration Services: Building on Documentum's eRoom technology, this feature puts together temporary workspaces with folders, notes, and a discussion space. It's all designed to support virtual teams.

5) Various process management tools, and a process engine, to address workflow and management. These are important because ECM isn't just about finding, archiving, and manipulating content, it's about being able to do so within existing business processes, e.g. rules-based work queues.

What emerges, especially in combination with EMC's storage and storage management capabilities, is a truly enterprise-class solution for managing content.

This is especially important because, when Microsoft enters content management, all vendors who target the smaller and medium-sized segments of the market will be threatened. EMC Documentum's enterprise differentiation, and positioning as part of EMC, may be of strategic value when Microsoft comes into the space.

Source: Line 56