Background: My company has decided to go with Documentum for its ECM solution. We have installed D 6.5 SP1 (Linux/Oracle) in our non production environments and are in the process of designing and setting up the repositories. We have lookup tables for enterprise-wide data which will be used to populate metadata on content. Some examples of these are Department, Division, Content Type. We are considering the option of registering all these tables in Documentum and querying for data using DFS. The data in these tables will also be accessed by other applications that will not be using/storing content in the Documentum repositories.
The question is this: Of the 2 options listed below, what are the pros/cons of each? What would be the recommended solution for an organization such as ours - a Fortune 500 financial services company?
Option 1: Keep these tables registered in Documentum. Expose services - custom services built on DFS or core DFS services to enable access to these tables by enterprise wide applications.
Option 2: Keep these tables in their own schema, different from Documentum and expose WCF services for consumption by other applications. We have developed and maintain a WCF servicce framework for our current imaging solution. In this case, our custom Documentum apps will use these WCF services to query these tables.
One point to note is that we will not be using any OOTB Documentum applications like Webtop for ingesting, retrieval or viewing content.
Any suggestions, feedback about either approach is greatly appreciated.
TIA
