Looking for Virtual Document Use Cases

Hi Community,

I'm looking for examples of the use of Documentum's virtual document feature. For what types of applications are you using virtual documents? What business problems does the feature solve? What are the technical advantages that virtual documents bring to your application? And to balance the picture, what are the challenges associated with implementing virtual documents? Are virtual documents unique to Documentum, or can you do something similar with other products?

Feel free to share any experiences you've had working with virtual documents. Thanks in advance for your contributions.

Regards,

Jerry

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Comments

eikrid

I know of two

XML documents, if the XML application implements chunking a virtual document is a result and users work on either part or whole of the document depending on the requirements
In some process driven applications, required documents that accompany an application for example are assembled (sometimes over a period of time if they are not all available at the same time) and attached to a virtual document as a way to combine them. This make it easy to access by the user and programmatically as well as seperate the types of documents (containing documents) from the container (virtual document) that can hold client centric information for example

DCTM_Guru

For what types of applications are you using virtual documents?

I have seen virtual docs used in generating contracts and technical manuals.

What business problems does the feature solve?

Dynamic assembly of content that is "chunked" into smaller entities that customer would like to reuse in multiple documents

What are the technical advantages that virtual documents bring to your application?

It provides the ability for users to graphically move chunks around via UI.

And to balance the picture, what are the challenges associated with implementing virtual documents?

Without the UI, you are basically left to use sort order index and then have to build a mechanism to adjust the indexes when a user inserts a chunk within predefined sequence.

Are virtual documents unique to Documentum, or can you do something similar with other products?

Ironically, the closest feature to virtual documents is what Document Science xPressoin suite provides.

pettitk

Over the past 15 years, I have only seen it used in xml and/or tech pub solutions.

bacham2

The first use case for virtual documents was managing the technical documentation of the Boeing 777 plane. As far as I know it helped shape the design of virtual documents in documentum (its ancestor, the composite object, didn't meet the requirements and was replaced by the virtual document in release 1.1). The challenge is to provide to the customer (i.e. the airline) the complete plane documentation with the exact components that the customer ordered (e.g. Rolls Royce engine for AA and Pratt & Whitney engine for Delta, etc.).

The other early use-case is the New Drug Application (NDA) in the pharmaceutical industry. Again a voluminous documentation consisting of multiple documents in multiple formats and generated over the course of more than a decade. The submission for each country has to adjusted to the local requirements.

jeremyprioux

I've seen virtual document through the publication of technical documentation. VD snapshot were also used as it was a way to create baselines (ie packaging of a selected subset of document and folder) and freeze the result.

There were some business rules to create baseline with the appropriate content (depends on document type, lifecycle etc.) and also an export feature (SBO creating a zip).

One other classic application is managing appendix of documents

Nitesh_Golchha

Virtual Documents is extensively used in XML Transformation Services for importing DITAMAPs and DOCBOOKs which is mainly used in technical publications.

PanfilovAB

It's tolally useless feature unless you are using assemblies