Momentum 2012 Session: The New Documentum D2

Here we go, the first session at Momentum 2012 at EMC World 2012 in Las Vegas. After breakfast in the enormous Dining Hall we gathered in the Momentum area of the conference for the first session around newly acquired Documentum D2 client. Responsible for the session were Brian Roche and Boris Carbonelli. Peggy Ringhausen is also working with D2 and was present at the session.

The main goals for this project are:

  • Respond quickly
  • Deploy easily
  • Delight Users

The overall idea is to compress the time from inception to roll-out to end users, something Documentum users has not been used to especially from the WDK era. Sure WDK was a great (even price-winning) technology of its time but we grew accustomed that even small customizations of the user interface took many days of development and required recompiling the application or at least restarting the server. That has all changed now.

New in EMC Documentum D2 4.0

  • Cross-browser Support (all the major ones)
  • Workspaces
  • Themes
  • Widgets
  • Cross repository search
  • Open Simultaneous workspaces
  • View Centerstage Spaces

There is a set of fredefined workspaces  but you can also create your own with drag and drop widgets from the widget gallery.

Customers thought it was important with themes so that was included in this release. Very easy to change and modify themes without restart.

Interface is based on Googe Web Tool (GWT) which of course makes me wander about how the convergence with the ExtJS-based interfaces will look like.

D2FS

D2 do not use UCF for content transfer instead there is either a D2 Applet or a D2 Branch Office Caching Services (BOCS) plugin that does the job. That of course also means that Java needs to be installed on client machines. D2 is also available in the EMC Ondemand solution.

Just as their CTO Jeroen Brian promised to do less slides and more demo so after a 15 minutes or so it was time to fire up the doing on a Macbook. The demo of the user was made in Safari whereas the admin and configuration stuff was run in a virtual machine inside VMWare on that Mac.

One thing that I enjoy with Documentum Centerstage is that it restore sessions and similarly D2 restores the interface just where you left it. It is a vital approach to lower the threshold for how users quickly can get back to work by picking it up where they left it.

Workspace Gallery include a set o predefined workspace which contains different widgets depending on the targeted user category. Things like:

– Consumer

– Contributor (full, preview, vertical)

– Web

Very fast browsing which is nice. Autohide of the menu and he could easily group documents by status. You can also go full screen directly from thumbnail to show slides or full pages. I wander what the default size of the renditions are set to. Need to be big enough to actually avoid firing up Powerpoint or Keynote.

It seemed very easy layout configuration of widgets, just drag them around to where you wanted them.

There is a new Centerstage Browser as a widget which is great I think. I think it is wrong when certain type of contextual information about an object can only be viewed in a certain client. Different presentation of course but not different information in different clients.

The also have a new web widget to show web pages inline in D2. Google Gadgets can be included which means that there already are a catalogue of things to start from. You can also interact between Google Gadgets and widgets in D2.

It is possible to configure what widgets made available to users not only available workspaces.

Did a demo where he apply watermark upon download of file to computer. Changed the setting for the watermark, hit saved and showed the same watermark again with no restart. Cool!

D2 Config is configured using a Matrix which to me looked a bit strange at first.

The horizontal Lines contain rules whereas the vertical Columns define in which context to apply each rule. Behind each rule for instance lies complete configuration options so the interface initially looks like you can’t do much but the configuration options are huge.

Show how easy it was to create a new tab and show a new field with an attribute with a drop down menu which can be populated through Dictionary and DQL

No server restart – no compilation required. Applies for visible metadata or style of water marks. Themes can be switched runtime.

Internal widgets are those coming with the product and external widgets (develop yourself or use from internet like Google Gadgets.

Demoed how to search for Gadget using the tools search, inserted the widget URL from the Gadget and used it in a workspace.

Also workflow information is available as widgets in D2:

  • Workflow
  • Browser
  • Task lists
  • Task Details
  • Attachment
  • Notes
  • Performers

No workflow map as of now.

Besides watermarks headers and footers can also be applied dynamically upon download

D2 4.0 is scheduled is Q3 and after that there will be a release every 6th months according to the current release schedule.

There is another product called O2 which is used to transfer MS document properties to and from the repository.

 

2 thoughts on “Momentum 2012 Session: The New Documentum D2

  1. Where they are taking v4 looks great. D2 today is great for configuration and instant changes – really does work, but UI and tie-in to IE not great. Now that D4 moves away from this IE dependency and adds great new extension model we could have a very powerful tool. That and xCP2 makes for some powerful voodoo 🙂

  2. Meant “UI and its tie to IE not great” above. Not the UI itself…

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