Ask the Expert: Features + Benefits of EMC Documentum D7

Welcome to this EMC Ask the Expert event! At Momentum Vienna, we announced EMC Documentum D7. This release now allows you to realize faster time to value on your Enterprise Content Management investments, 10x faster deployments and up to 8X better price to performance. This Ask the Expert discussion provides you with the opportunity to ask questions about the features and benefits of EMC Documentum D7.

This event will begin on Monday, February 11 and be moderated through Friday, February 15. Get ready by bookmarking this page or signing up to receive email notifications.

Your host:

Patrick Walsh is a content management specialist with over twenty years’ experience building large-scale information solutions. He is currently the EMC product manager charged with the roadmap of the Documentum platform and its Extended Services, and as an EMC veteran Patrick's ready to comment on just about any product, or connect you with someone closer to the details you need.

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Patrick Walsh

Thanks, Stephanie!

I’m very excited about this opportunity to share the benefits of Documentum 7 with this community and hear your feedback. Documentum has been the leader in Enterprise Content Management for a long time and this release provided us with the opportunity to both prepare for new client and solution development and focus on improved cost of ownership and customer experience. Co-released with XCP 2.0, our composable application platform, Documentum 7 and its extended services take advantages of the latest EMC developments in virtualization and security to provide a range of new benefits, including:

Intelligent Session Management:

In Documentum 7.0, user sessions at the client are dramatically reduced to the minimum number of Content Server and database connections while maintaining session integrity and security. Intelligent Session Management (ISM) allows you to maximize the current investment in your existing application infrastructure, making it less costly to operate your environment (Documentum and your database resources) as user count and content footprint increases.

Complete information intelligence:

With xPlore 1.3, Documentum can provide the clearest information visibility for stronger business insights. Users have greater sorting options while also having the ability to navigate and analyze search results through faceted search capabilities like those available in online commercial catalogues like Amazon.com.

Advanced thesaurus support: This capability allows a business to customize search with their business specific terms and synonyms. This is a useful capability in industries like pharmaceuticals where a drug can have a scientific name, an internal project name, and an external marketing name.
Customizable text processing: Improves xPlore classification capabilities, increasing accuracy and improving search results
Query-based subscriptions: Enable users to subscribe to specific queries and automatically get notified of results via e-mail notification when updates occur.
Recommendation engine: An add-on to xPlore that can utilize other Documentum events and data to recommend documents and people for which a user might have further interest.

Increased IT agility:

With the Documentum 7.0 platform, organizations can realize a faster time to value with their ECM investments.

xCelerated Management System (xMS): The Documentum platform’s xMS technology, developed in conjunction with VMware, facilitates faster, automated, policy-based deployment that occurs in hours, not days or weeks, and reduces the need for Documentum expertise. xMS orchestration will simplify and accelerate enterprise-wide development and deployment of high-value, content-centric applications and solutions to meet your business requirements.
Automated indexing: With xPlore 1.3, Documentum 7.0 enhances the ability to automatically index user-defined data models. This automatic indexing results in faster deployment times as performance tuning can be done by xPlore rather than database administrators, reducing complexity and time.

Trusted Security:

The Trusted Content Services extension is now aligned with RSA to provide native encryption capabilities in compliance with recognized industry standards, such as FIPS for U.S. Federal public sector entities and financial services. New 128 bit AES encryption provides for greater protection and dramatically lower overhead. Plus the option to integrate with RSA’s Data Protection Manager for Remote Key Management extends key authorization and authentication across your organization’s systems.

mszurap

Dear Patrick,

The features above are great, but these are mostly content server features. Do you have any information about the client applications as well?

Do I see well that Webtop is "discontinued", and had not been released in D7? How is it aligned with xCP and Documentum D2? Is D2 gonna be a "replacement" for Webtop? How can we address the significant price change between Webtop and xCP/D2?

Do you see a trend that clients/customers are moving towards custom developed clients?

Are there any change, improvement in services layer: DFS and/or CMIS?

Thank you,

best regards

Mike

Elliott

Patrick,

I have the same questions about the UI as Mike. Will Webtop 6.7SP2 be compatable with D7? What is the UI strategy going forward (D2 or custom only)?

Other questions - will the currently supported environments for D7 (Linux/Oracle, Windows/Oracle and Windows SQL Server) be the only one supported in the future? IS RPS required to set retention dates on documents that are going to Centera storage?

Thanks,

Elliott

Patrick Walsh

Hi Mike,

Thanks for feedback on the server features.

Let me assure you that Webtop is here to stay. Webtop is a mature and powerful content managment application. We will continue to maintain Webtop and keep it current with operating environments. We are in the final stages of the 6.7 SP2 version of Webtop which will release along with other Documentum products in just a few weeks.

With D7, we provide for decoupled client-server deployments. 6.7 SP2 client applications will be forward-certified against 7.0 Content Server. This means that highly customized Webtop applications do not need to be rewritten to take advantage of TCO improvements added in 7.0. By porting the Intelligent Session Management (ISM) client enablement to 6.7 SP2's Documentum Foundation Classes (DFC), all 6.7 SP2 client applications become ISM enabled.

As far as client direction, we are focused on providing rapid time to value for Documentum-based solutions under our internal "better applications, more quickly" mantra. We will continue to reduce solution costs, improve customer experience and drive innovation with future investments in our composable application framework, XCP, and our configurable content-centric application, D2. Please note that D2 is not a Webtop replacement. D2 provides an alternative to the highly customized content solutions built with Webtop. With D2, customers can rapidly deliver new content solutions leveraging the power of configuration.

Patrick Walsh

I don't think that customers are moving toward custom developed clients. But I understand that there is growing demand for tighter solution fit. End users need the right information and tools at the right time. configuration and composition offer two avenues to meet the needs of the business user without heavy reliance on custom code which is always costly to build and maintain compared to the repeatability of good development tools.

Patrick Walsh

When custom development is necessary, developers can still turn to our Web Services. There were no major changes to WebServices in D7. Which makes it easy to incorporate certified D7 access into your custom applications. DFS 7.0 adds improved fault tracing with a new exception interface. And we obviously bubbled up enhancements like Dormant State and multi-domain kerberos authentication. CMIS 7.0 added an update for the v1 Errata.

Also we have continued our development on our lean core REST APIs. We have learned alot from internal projects and beta / technical programs about what is needed to support new client applications and devices. This promises to be a great new programming interface later this year.

Patrick Walsh

Hi Elliot, please join in above if you need more information on client direction.

Documentum 7.0 is focused on enabling our customers to deploy our stack in a next-generation, private cloud / virtualized x86 scale-out datacenter while bringing new capabilities to market as fast as possible. To accomplish these goals, we rebalanced our investments – this will ultimately result in many new benefits to our customers, but with a narrower range of certified infrastructure, relative to D6.x. In D7, the software support matrix was optimized for the platforms most typical of these deployments:

D7 certifications.png

You can see that Documentum server certifications have been aligned to Windows and Linux stacks. Documentum solutions deployed to certified application servers can interoperate with a Content Server on any stack combination via the Documentum Foundation Classes (DFC) layer. This approach makes applications transferable and allowed for decoupled client-server direction mentioned above.

We believe that the benefits of scale-out x86 architectures will make other deployment models obsolete and customers need to plan for this eventuality. However, we also recognize that some of our customers have made significant long term investments in other infrastructures. To accommodate these customers, we plan to expand our certification matrix according to popular business needs with subsequent release of Documentum. At Momentum Europe we announced our intention to expand our plans to support an Oracle stack of Solaris-Oracle and an IBM stack of AIX-DB2 in the near future. We will also be adding support for Windows Server 2012 under the Windows stack.

Patrick Walsh

In previous releases, you could assign specific retention dates for Content stored in EMC Centera or NetApp SnapLock stores. With D7, RPS is required to set retention on any Documentum controlled content regradless of storage location. One retention mechanism allows enforcement of all policies without conflict and across multiple storage devices. Not only do you gain consistent protection for all your content, but it allows us to expose future storage integrations with a common mechanism.

Elliott

Patrick,

Thanks for the information.

I have a couple of questions about the patch releases for D7. It looks like the readme for D7 patch 2 is cumulative, is that the way that they will be in the future (in 6.6 and 6.7 the readmes are specific to that patch)? The readme is also a html file, instead of a PDF (6.6 and 6.7 are PDFs), will they continue to be in that format?

Also, a question about your software development process. As issues are identified in CS 6.6 and 6.7 are those fixes brought forward into the D7 code line?

Thanks,

Elliott

jsilver

For more information on our client direction, please refer to these blog posts:

Patrick Walsh

We are very keen on aligning the products in repeatable and predictable ways. We first adopted our cumulative or rolling patch process in September of 2010. We had great feedback on the core groups of products - it's so much easier than installing each patch separately. Over the last 29 months we have expanded the program to include nearly every product. By the end of this year I expect every Documentum patch to conform to this practice.

DCTM_Guru

Hi Patrick,

What Elliott was referencing was the cumulative read me/release notes? We know the patches were cumulative, but the documentation for each patch was specific to that patch (and not cumulative).

-Johnny

Patrick Walsh

Thanks, Johnny.

Based on feedback, we heard it was difficult to keep track of all the fixes available in each Patch. Now it's much cleaner to have all the release information within a single document, including all the cumulative fixes.

Let me know if you have any more ideas on improvements.

pettitk

Hi Patrick, we are POC'ing D7/xCP 2 right now as well. Lots of cool stuff. Not sure you can comment on Designer/xms issues, or only core 7 stuff... but here are my questions today.

We are finding the xms deployment process very problematic. Sometimes it works from designer, and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it doesn't work in Designer, but does with CLI. Sometimes it fails the second time, other times its ok the 2nd time. Today, in Designer, there were no errors listed in Designer itself under Problems tab, but it fails when deploying. This time its complaining about not being able to resolve an invocation of a module, which is included in Designer, but for some reason isn't getting into the system via xms. We have a ticket created for this one.

2013/02/15 11:05:21,718 ERROR [executionCommandExecutor-6] - Repository deployment failed
com.emc.xcp.installer.ArtifactBundleInstallException: java.lang.Exception: Artifact 'Create Case Pre Award' post install action ...Failure
at com.emc.xcp.installer.internal.DarInstaller.install(DarInstaller.java:233)
at internal.com.emc.xcp.builder.deployment.deployers.RepositoryDeployer.runDarInstall(RepositoryDeployer.java:171)

Caused by: DfException:: THREAD: pool-11-thread-1; MSG: Unable to resolve Invoke Java Service definition using OOTB functions. Module xcp_insert_to_scheduling_table is missing in docbase; ERRORCODE: ff; NEXT: null

We also have seen workflows that are fine in Designer, but when deployed, show no errors, but when you try to run/use them in the system, they are actually uninstalled. There was no forewarning of this. I would really expect it to show problems in Designer or at a min in xms if it wasn't going to install once it arrived.

Also today, we were getting an error when doing the lab from the courseware, and trying to deploy it. says:

ERROR : The application could not be deployed, because the workqueue parameter 'Claims Work Queue' with value. Again, in Designer, no errors/Problems noted, but when you get to xms, it fails.

Are there any white papers or documentation beyond the guides alreaedy in subscribenet for xms best practices.

-KP

mcbris

This Ask the Expert event has now concluded, but the conversation continues on the Documentum Support Forum. Patrick will be following up on final questions in the thread's new location.

Please feel free to continue this discussion. Other subject matter experts on D7 are welcome to post their thoughts and experiences on the topics. Thank you to all those who participated in this event!

Patrick Walsh

Hi Kyle,

First I'm glad to hear that you've logged a Support Ticket for your issue. That's the best way to

start tracking to a resolution on any issue.

Second I'm glad to hear your feedback. In general, realworld, hands-on insight is invaluable to the

product teams. And especially for a product like xMS. It is a great new tool with amazing cost-saving potential. It's been through considerable internal and partner testing, but as a 1.0 release we're ready to work through any difficulties that you encounter or situations that we couldn't anticipate. The great news is that xMS follows our monthly cumulative product patch cycle and any improvements will be made generally available as soon as possible.

I've run your questions past our xMS and Designer gurus, Randy Hodge and Ahson Ahmad:

xMS manages the provisioning of the virtual Documentum and XCP 2.0 environments. It also powers the

application deployment. Typically you deploy from Designer in a rapid application development

scenario that follows the Compose-Deploy-Test...Repeat cycle. When you are ready to deploy to Staging

or Production, you would switch to the command line interface of xMS. In both cases xMS is the engine

executing the deployment recipes and no diferences are expected. We need to dive into your details with EMC Support.

The xCP deployment guide is the place to start to understand how to use xMS to deploy

applications. Additional training is in development and will be introduced into the D7 training curriculum.

Good luck,

-Patrick