EMC Documentum Embraces SOA, Eclipse

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EMC (Quote) brushed the dust off its Documentum
software, issuing the company’s first major upgrade of the enterprise
content management (ECM) platform in more than two years.

EMC Documentum 6 has been crafted
to better handle Web services, whereas the March 2005 release of Documentum 5.3 was rewritten
significantly to share the same code base, security model, repository,
object model and programming interfaces.

Karin Ondricek, who works in Documentum platform marketing for EMC’s content
management and archiving unit, said the main thrust of Documentum 6 is on
building, configuring and deploying applications for service-oriented
architecture (SOA) systems.

“We’re seeing a lot of customers look around their IT environments and see
that they have systems from three, four or five different vendors,” Ondricek said.
“That’s incredibly expensive from a maintenance perspective, so they’re
starting to move toward a standardization model, which means using fewer
vendors to deploy more applications on a common back-end.”

To address the challenges associated with disparate platforms, Documentum 6
includes a Web services-based API
(define) that helps enterprise content services work with other
business applications within a SOA.

This API is a departure from the proprietary Documentum API, because it
offers a vendor-neutral framework for developers working with content-management tools.

In essence, services built with the API were designed to allow developers
with no Documentum experience to build ECM applications quickly and easily.

EMC hasn’t stopped there with regard to standardization; its Documentum
Composer is now based on the Eclipse integrated development environment
(IDE), which reduces the need for manual coding and reuses assets in classic
SOA fashion.

Like the new content services API, Composer is an
alternative to proprietary tools that existed independently and served
specific functions.

Finally, Documentum 6 features branch office caching to help local business
users view, create, edit and search content from the platform at a high
level of performance, regardless of where they are.

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