The Blogger’s lounge is a great water hole to stop by to get a really good latte but of course also sit down in nice chairs and sofas with power outlets on the floor to blog and tweet about experiences at EMC World 2010 in Boston. Today I stopped by in the morning to have my photo taken with Jamie Pappas who is Enterprise 2.0 & Social Media Strategist, Evangelist & Community Manager at EMC. Be sure to visit her blog and follow her on Twitter. My dear Canon EOS 5D camera managed to capture the nice lighting in the lounge I think.
Day: May 12, 2010
EMC World 2010: What is New and What’s Coming in Documentum xCP?
This session was presented by John McCormick on Tuesday morning.
The three pillars are:
- Information Governance
- xCP
- Information Access
EMC wants to help customers to get maximum leverage from their information and Deliver the leading application composition platform for information management and case processing.
Intelligence Case Management:
Data, People, Content, Collaboration, Reporting, Policies, Events, Communication, Process
Case Management: Argues that it is a discipline of information management which is:
- Non-deterministic
- Driven by Human Decsionmaking
- Driven by Content status
xCP Product Priniciples
- Enable Intelligent business decisions (content and business process analytics)
- Composition and configuration over coding
- Enable performance through responsiveness and usability
- Delight application builders and systems integrations
- Beyond Documents: People, process and information in context
- Leverage the private cloud
- Build a future-proof product (move to declarative composition model)
The goal is collapse all the existing products that makes up xCP into fewer ones.
It is about reusable components, compositions tools, xCelerators
Resusable components:
- Activities (templates)
- Forms
- UI
Tools:
- Process Builder
- Forms Builder
- Taskspace for the UI
What is coming next…
There are different version numbering for xCP and the Documentum platform and this is how they relate:
- xCP 1.5 – D 6.6 (June 2010?)
- xCP 1-6 – D 6.7
- xCP 2-0 – D7 (next-gen Case Management)
Focus for Documentum 6.6
- Real-world performance testing
- Composer 6.6 (dependency checking, simplfifcation
- Taskspace is getting better in 6.6
- Improved manageability (workflow agents behaves more gracefully)
- Forms Enhancement (conditional required fields, better relationship management)
- ATMOS Integration
Documentum 6.7
- Final release of D6 family (Q1 2011)
- Licence Management improvements
- Improved Search ( integration of DSS)
- Public Sector Readiness (Section 508 improvements for Taskspace)
- Composer Improvements (xCP application (and no manual installs and version ingestions)
6.5 SP2/SP3 and 6.6 ready for Documentum Search Server (DSS)
Integration of cloud storage ATMOS D 6.6
As soon as DSS is out the whole platform is supported on a virtualized environment.
vSphere integration & Certification (D 6.7)
Documentum 7 (xCP 2.0) Sneak peak – Increased Business Agility
- Composition is simpler
- Deployment is faster
- Case workers are more productive
Improving the tooling
- Single Composition Tool – xCP Composition Tool probably based on Eclipse
- Modeling view
- Compose a page/screen
Deployments is Faster
- Leverage the private cloud
- Everything is virtualized
- Deploy to an already installed environment directly from xCP composition tool to a VMWare instance
User Experience
- Better insights into cases
- Better viewing experience
- Integrated capture
- There will be a new Web Services based UI
- Easy to search and add content to a case
- Easier inline viewing
EMC World 2010: Customizations of Centerstage
The session was presented by Andrew Goodale who is the architect behind Centerstage. I am not a developer but to me this session was very important because I believe that the level of customizations possible greatly influence the potential of a successful Centerstage deployment. A lot of the power of enterprise systems lies in the possibility to adapt to the business needs.
He started by exploring the Services SDK and outlined that the architecture is set up with a Direct Web Remoting (DWR) LIbrary do the magic between web browsers and Web Services WSDL.
Using DFS Types for Data Model where appropriate
- ObjectIdentify
- DataObject
- PropertySet
- TypeInfo
Simplification was needed to support broader language adoptions because it is hard to called them from anything else than Java and .Net
Trouble calling them from Flash
- No use of abstract XML Types
- Minimize the number of XML namespaces
- Need to support invocation from un-typed languages (e.g. Javascript)
Interface Design
- Restricted set of data types
The DFS error handling is fine for programmatic access but when you want to show a progress dialogue and had new data structures for that. If you copy 200 files some of them could invoke an error there is important that these are handled and for instance not importing anything from file number 53…instead give more extensive information to the user of what happened and what went wrong without breaking the import after the error.
Foundation Services
- Create blogs, wikis,
- Manage spaces
- Templates
Application Services
Overview
- Provide the “guts” of Centerstage
- Capture application logic that is UI.agnostic
Basic Content Services (Create, Checkin, Checkin, Copy, Move, Delete and Properites dialog)
- Icon
- Lists (Grid data sources – a declarative mechanism for creating queries, handling sorting, pagination and caching)
- Permissions (simplified permission levels to standard dm_acl
- Search (Knows about CS Artefacts and Integrates CIS entities with facets)
DFS Core Services
Possible to use them to modify CS artifacts
– for example ObjectsService.copy to copy a wiki page
Copy things, add things to a page etc
Our DOF modules will enforce data constraints which for instance means that you can’t copy a page object without copying the page content
Deploying the SDK
- A zip.file containing binaries and javadocs
- Centerstage Services are added to core SDK
- “remote” jars only – a deployed centertsage server is needed
Setup
– Unzip the SD
For Java your classpath should include
– DFS runtime, JAX-WS, JAX-B
Java: centerstage-foundation-remote-jar and centerstage-application-remote.jar
.Net requures 3.0 SDK for WCF, Visual Studio Optional)
Samples in both Java and .Net
Creating a Space
Uses the Blank Template which ships with Centerstage
- Identify qualification shows how to pick a specific template
- Using a template guarantees that the space will be Centerstage-compatible
- Space needs a home page
Returns and OperationStatusSet
- The standard return type for creates, updates
- Allows validation errors to be returned.
Creating a Wiki – child pages to the wiki can be added in the same way
An activity template can create a space and send an invitation email to everyone.
Java samples can be built with Ant 1.7 and Java 1.5 Not IDE requirement – Eclipse will work fine.
Sample: Wiki to eBook sample
Goal:
- Given URL to a CEnterstage wiki, create and ePub book
- Each wiki page becomes a chapter in the book
- Blogs and Discussions can also be converted
- High-fideliyt (the rich text in CS is XHTML in the repository)
- Page links are preserved
What it shows
- PageService
- Fetch wiki home page
The used a set of Google code – Java library that builds ePub books – contributed by Adobe
http://code.google.com/p/epub-tools/
Centerstage Mini – Demo to call services from Javascript
Goal:
- Build and HTML page that shows Centerstage data
- Pure AJAX Technologies
What it shows
- How to call services from JavaScript
- How si data marshaled
Demo showed the Recent Activity in an external native ExtJS Grid
List Services
The SDK for CS is not licensed….basically need a CS license to use it…
eBook Sample is available on ECN
The SDK will be in GA in the July timeframe.
To me it seems more powerful than I thought that it is now possible to programmatically be able to setup Centerstage Space and modify existing ones. That gives us an opportunity to create “templates” for common things that the business needs to do using E 2.0 features. Instead of relying that users are aware of all the possibilities and can execute them manually we now can have quick buttons to do that or use workflows or external systems to trigger these actions.