No.
DFS is an integral part of the current API strategy. In a few years that might well change, but not for the current versions up to and including 7.0.
In a few years that might well change,
Can you elaborate a bit please, Andy what do you mean by that?
Basically at some point EMC will stop supporting it, they will have moved with the times and in 10 years time DFS may no longer be relevant dependant on the technology stacks in place. REST may be what we use in the future or perhaps something else...think about WDK, that is still just about with us but is on maintenance after quite a few years, DFS will eventually go that way as it becomes seen as old and not suitable for whatever new technologies, such as the NextGen stuff, come up with.
If there is a real worry then best bet is to raise a ticket with EMC themselves and ask what the EOL dates are for the current versions and what [known] plans are there for it.
I'd say that if you develop an application with DFS then in 10 years you can still be using it, if the underlying technogies are still there. think about 5.3, that is still in use even though support stopped quite some time ago.
Yup, makes sence.
Agree with Andy's point that eventually all products move to an end of life state but that doesn't mean you can't continue using them (or pay for extended support).
If you are worried about future support, we see lots of clients, particularly in financial services, develop their own web service layer to isolate their application from Documentum rather than using DFS. It was probably more about wanting control of the service layer than specifically any issues with DFS. For many of our clients, many developed their service layer before DFS was released.
We built our own service layer - OpenContent - http://www.tsgrp.com/Open_Source/OpenContent/open-content.jsp so that our products could work on Documentum as well as other tools. Currently OpenContent just leverages the DFC but we have always stated that we could move it to DFS/CMIS or whatever depending on where Documentum goes in the future.
My two cents but agree with all the previous posts that DFS will be around for some time.
Dave
Many clients (especially in Financial Services) also feel that DFS is too fine-grained a web services layer and seek to create a simplier domain specific interface more relevant to their needs and vendor agnostic.
Agree that it is sometimes too fine grained, but it is an API.
If you use it as the toolkit, as I have done, then you can easily create custom services based on the DFS semantics, data structures, helper classes and infrastructure (content transfer and security) to produce domain speciifc interfaces.
Thank you for your inputs
