Best Solution

jose.machado.pereira

Hello everybody,

I need a little advice to think about the best solution to resolve a problem:

The problem is:

An company based in Spain is going to open a new office in South Africa.

To reduce content circulation through the network, was thought to have documents relating to South Africa duplicated, meaning two repositories.

The repository of Spain containing all documents (including South Africa's Docs) and the repository of South Africa only South Africa's Docs.

Is this the best approach? And is there any tool to ensure duplication of only certain documents in several repositories?

Tks,

vincentklock

A long time ago I used a distributed docbase: the central, database server was located in France, but each remote site had its own content server. It was back in 4i / 5.2 time, I am not sure it is still usable now, but you might try searching for it, as it seems to match your criteria.

Alvaro_de_Andres

Have you considered using BOCS?

Harry_123

I believe there are limitations with BOCS. The number of documents you can cache on the BOCS server is limited. I'm not sure if the figures are right, but i believe OOTB you can cache 100K documents and you can push it to 1 million with configuration changes.

jeremyprioux

I definitely advice you, as Alvaro de Andres previously said, to consider BOCS.

Synchronisation between repository or document publication using a specific development could end up with a lot of troubles. Thus, depends on your business needs, but you could benefit from having only one repository with up-to-date documents and all audittrails included.

PanfilovAB

,

Just interesting, have you ever tried to use BOCS or you are just translating an opinion of EMC (like distributed configurations are to complex (comm: and do not bring license fee because number of users stays the same), so customer should use BOCS)? I ask this question because we have tried to estimate usefulness of BOCS and found that traffic, related to content transfer, is just a quarter of the whole HTTP-traffic, that means that remote user mostly wastes his time for page loading rather than content transfer.

jeremyprioux

Hello PanfilovAB,

I've not any metrics about BOCS, sorry, but I guess this is depending on your application usage and your content sizes. In your case, if you've seen that only 25% of content traffic could be speeded up by BOCS, then it's true that BOCS will not solve all of your problems at once.. but these 25% will be improved though !

I think BOCS is the best solution if connexion between remote user (or remote app server) and central repository is good enough to load pages in a decent amount of time but not good enough to allow big or multiple content transfer. If in your case you can't even load app pages then ...

And, last thing, I'm pretty sure you can set up a content proxy system by yourself as good as BOCS, as long as you have the skills to configure and manage it over the time

PanfilovAB

 I've not any metrics about BOCS, sorry, but I guess this is depending on your application usage and your content sizes.

Could you suggest a case when BOCS might bring visible benefit? One extreme case you already got: webtop and word/pdf files (actually if I perform some content optimizations I can reduce content/html proportion to 10%, moreover I can convert some files (like tiff images) to pdf and take advantage of streaming). Another extreme case is large files - it's better to use local (for remote users) repository if customer stores media content.

Haroon_A

Have you explored distributed configuration (Remote Content Server), where you store content close to your geographic locations (remote content server), but metadata resides centrally.

erictwendell

Well yes Synchronizing the document publication by using a specific development can give rise to number of troubles. Thus everything depends upon your business needs, But even I think that BOCS serves best if connection between central repository and remote user (or remote app server) is good enough to load pages in a decent amount of time but only disadvantage is that you cannot load large content. So various Solution Providers suggest to use content proxy system in such cases. You can use that if you posses the management skills.

jose.machado.pereira

So we chosen to use BOCS.

I thank you all.

Anyone I'd installed it?

How much time did you spent?

Thanks

Harry_123

The installation doesnt take that long. Precaching of the content does take time depending on your network with the remote site. Remember you need to have the Documentum Messaging server (dms) installed preferably on a seperate server.

ThaboSikwe

Hi Jose,

BOCS could work best in a single-repository distributed model.

However it seems that you want to implement a multi-repository model, whereby there's a repository in Spain as well as a separate one in South Africa. Which I think is Ahamd's suggestion above.

Depending on how you want to manage your content, one of our clients here in South Africa only used the Federation option, and kept content in their separate repositories globally. (Yes, data was not centrally managed) But they could access data in different repositories without any network issues.

I would recommend reading the "Documentum Content Server Distributed Configuration Guide" document which is available on EMC Support, it could help in exploring all your options.

Advise if you could need some assistance from anyone in South Africa.

Thanks.

ThaboSikwe

Here's the link:

https://support.emc.com/docu50514_Documentum-Content-Server-7.1-Distributed-Configuration-Guide-.pdf?language=en_US

HMJ

Do any of you know if BOCS is "free" for an Opentext Documentum customer?

DCTM_Guru

@HMJ - I doubt OpenText would give away BOCS, but the only way to know is to contact your sales rep.