Before going on my planned sick-leave I played around with DAM 6.5 for a while. I will try to summarize a few reflections I have on this brand new release.

Good things
The interface have got yet another refresh but rather small modifications that I guess I won’t even notice in a couple of weeks. The biggest change is that some functions have got modal windows meaning that when you click on properties you no longer see the big full screen page but instead a new browser window that allows you to see where you where when you clicked. A great improvement I think. The import/export/check-in process also has small modal windows with a nice looking update progress bar.

A thing that I just love is the new clusters/facets features which appears when performing a search. Your results can then be drilldowned based on user, topic, date and so forth. Will improve findability hugely. We had these installed in D6 SP0 but they did not work then and seem to be connected more closely to ECI Services back then.

In general the interface is prettier and looks more distinct and modern. The icons have been slightly improved as well.
Another small improvement is that attributes which have both value assistance (dropdowns) but also allows entering of an own value now have the correct width.

I guess it is not really connected to this upgrade but I finally manage to find how one creates Presets (rules) for specific folders and users which was great. Look at the three structure in DA – not in the menu.

Bad things
The left tree structure has been cleaned up with clearer icons and the update is based on AJAX (or should see bad below). This works fine in Documentum Administrator 6.5 but for some reason they seemed to have missed something in compiling DAM because there is small refresh anyway when you click on a folder. Our partner suggest that they simply have inherited from the wrong WDK-class.

Another interesting thing is that some features that are highly marketed at EMC World are turned off by default in the configuration files. Those include Deep Export and OLE-linking support (resolving links in Office documents and imports associated files if desired). That is rather strange I think since those are really handy features. The OLE-linking can also be toggled on/off in Preferences. The effect of that is that there was no folder export available at all which is fairly strange. We also had some issues with getting import of more than two folders working.

We also have a an irritating issue around thumbnails. It seems that those can not be created for PDF-files at all which also means no storyboarding. When reading through the release notes this is noted as a known bug and it seems that despite our bug report from earlier this year nothing has been done to fix it. From a usability standpoint that is not so good.

If you haven’t done it already I recommend a look at the site for the beta of EMC Documentum’s new web client called CenterStage. This modern Web 2.0 client has earlier been called both Magellan and IntelliSpace but EMC now seem to have settled on the name CenterStage. It is kind of funny because I associate CenterStage with a TV application for Mac OS X which is found at the CenterStage Project site. Anyway it is interesting to see how the interfaces and feature looks for the free CenterStage Essentials (included in any Content Server license) and the paid version called CenterStage Pro. I have long waited to for a good application that both can do ”Facebook for the Enterprise” while still having all the features of an advanced and full-fledged Enterprise Content Management platform. This seem to be a big step towards that. The key thing is to be able to collaborate both around content (documents etc) but also around people, groups and projects. Although there are good collaboration platforms out there such as Clearspace which has some basic integration with Documentum it is still creating a lot of duplicate information in separate ”stove-pipes”. I want the content objects found in the Clearspace platform stored in Documentum but this is not the case today. What we are looking at is being able to search Documentum content from Clearspace for the immediate future.

Again, back to Centerstage I believe it will provide a lot of organisations with a client that will be a lot more intuitive and useful out of the box than we have ever seen from Documentum before. This is thanks to an ambitions usability project run by Gideon Ansell in the Documentum User experience group. However, after having had a looked at the project release matrix found in the beta community it looks like the beta of CenterStage essentials will not have enough features to be the flexible collaboration client I need. Those features will be added later on this year. We just have to wait for the full CenterStage Pro version I think. I also hope that the few missing pieces like a full fledged personal profile, expert location and integration with external presence/Instant Messaging systems will be on the schedule for the next update of it.

This week I will be able to play with the Documentum 6.5 release for the first time since it is being installed by our Documentum partners at work. I especially look forward to see the new Digital Asset Manager (DAM) 6.5 client and TaskSpace 6.5. I also hope that I can get some further information about what release of the embedded FAST InStream Search engine is used in this release.