What are my Portal Options in Documentum?

achenkin

I have a client that is using WepTop as a portal - They are migrating from SharePoint 2003 to Documentum 6.0.  Webtop is NOT a good choice, since it is not really a Portal Application.  It is clear they are going to move away from WebTop.

My question is this:

What are their options for a Portal?  LifeRay, being an open-source product looks especially attractive.  Is this a good option?  What have you used that give you functionality and good integration with Documentum?

Thanks in Advance,

Alan

ukdavo

Liferay was an excellent portal when I last used it 18months ago and I believe that it's improved since then.

I found that the Documentum WDK portlets worked fine with Liferay. It's straightforward to develop a custom authentication scheme to integrate with Liferay's various authentication options (CAS, OpenSSO, etc) if the standard authentication options that you get with the WDK portlets are not sufficient.

Developing custom non-WDK portlets is straightforward. I used the standard Struts approach invoking DFC to pull in content from Documentum & document links in the WYSIWYG editor. You don't have to develop against Struts though - there are example Liferay portlets that use Flex, Spring MVC, etc.

Since that time Documentum's integration potential has improved significantly. I'd probably consider integration using DFS, RESTful web services (I think this is still in beta) or CMIS (Liferay now supports CMIS out of the box, Documentum's CMIS implementation is still in beta I think).

As for which approach is best - I'd say it depends on what it is you're trying to achieve. If your requirements can be met with the standard WDK portlets then I'd say go with them. If not, you've got plenty of options.

Regards