Month: January 2014

What’s new and next with Documentum D2 (old notes from EMC World 2013 & Momentum 13)

Found these notes from EMC World 2013 and decided to publish them even though the next EMC World is coming up soon.

This session was presented by Sunil Sharma, Principal Product Manager D2.

D2 4.1 has been released.

Talks about the move away from coding towards configuration. Move from efforts share of 20% configuration and 80% development to the opposite.

Highligthing the following benefits:

  • Faster delivery (from weeks to hours)
  • Lower risk (avoid long build & test cycles)
  • More responsiveness (Deploy/Configure/Run)
  • Expanded foot print (broader use)
  • More Compelling personalized and streamlined applications

Value for Documentum D2:

  • Productivity
  • Intelligence (content rules without coding)
  • Agility (easy to build and deploy)

Focus for the D2 4.1 release:

  • Enhanced usability (a broader set of advanced document management and content control capabiliites
  • Integration and interoperability
  • Search
  • Collaboration (on content using discussions on content and native annotation capabilities in MS Word.
  • Extensibiity (custom widgets with two-way applications)
  • Ënterprise focus (link admins to a limited set of applications)

Distribution is similar to quickflow from Webtop/DAM.

Features that I like are managing relationships, mass update of properties, saved search, faceted search, virtual document editing and document comparison.

Custom widgets can be developed. Listeners can be developed by customers around widgets provided by EMC. Make it possible to “catch” certain criteria of what is happening in an EMC Widget.

Example of custom PDF viewer where clicking on a Word-document shows the PDF rendition in a viewver. Also an example of showing diagrams and pie charts based on data in the repository such as values of certain attributes.

Cool example of creating a virtual folder structure based on attributes. Also example with maps where clicking on a document repositions the map and where searching for a city in the map updates the list of documents based on selected geolocation.

Possible to leverage the D2 rules engine in other application through D2FS API.

What is coming in 4.2:

  • Advanced doc management (drag & drop, extracting properties from email, advanced “email as link” with possibilities to pass queries and settings in the URL, content linking, bulk import with metadata in either .csv or .xml)
  • Search (nested facets, search summaries and term hit-highlighting)
  • Usability (iPad support)
  • Enterprise focus (HTTP transfer of files, context sensitive widgets)
  • Enterprise configuration (new abilities to secure a configuration from unwanted changes and preserving configurations using version control.

Simplified content creation process to be able to skip certain parts of the import process if you have a default configuration for each step or silent it.

Themes for future releases:

Pervasive Business Rules

Solution Platform Harmonization – D2 is the UI for content-centric applications. The idea is to use xCP to compose widgets and use them in D2. The page in xCP can be exposed in D2 either as a widget or a workspace.

Collaboration (D2 will replace Centerstage and eRoom).

Project Workspace

 

Documentum REST Services (old notes from EMC World 2013)

Realized that I had this draft från Michael Mohens session at EMC World around Documentum REST and decided to publish it even though time have passed and the REST-interface has been shipped and now we are waiting for xCP 2.1

REST mimics the way users use the Internet.

Everything is a resource and it is stateless – the server does not need to know where you come from and where you are going.

REST Services are programming/language/framework independent. Any language which has an HTTP framework. No SDK required.

If it is stateless it is much easier to scale. No session to replicated since the state is not persisted on the server side.

No SDK also means that there are no clients to upgrade so also scalability from an IT management perspective.

Acknowledges that EMC IIG have talked about that for a while but now they are ready to deliver.

Technology Preview 1 for Core Platform  announced on March 2013.

TP1 for xCP (generated by the actual application that you developed)

  • Business Objects
  • Content
  • Folders
  • Relationship

REST also coming for Captiva and D2 so D2FS is going away in the long run.

REST is shipping early Q3 2013 for Documentum 7 with the following features:

  • Authentication
  • Repository services
  • Object Services
  • Version Services
  • Schema Services

What is not in the first release (end user services had prioritization):

  • Lightweight object services
  • Access control (you can’t create a new ACL)
  • Lifecycle services
  • Virtual document services

xCP REST GA will be part of xCP 2.1 in Q1 2014

  • The concept is to automatically generated (almost everything will get a REST interface).

Spring is the biggest framework in the Java world.

Still deploy REST as w WAR-file just like Webtop or Media Workspace. API is stateless for HA and deployment flexibility. Previously it was bound to a host name.

Simple JSON and XML representations.

Authentication

  • HTTP basic authentication (great for inline passwords, make sure HTTPS is used!)
  • SPNEGO-based Kerberos (great for users in AD domain. (Can be done across multiple domains but be in the same forest with two-way forest)

Pushing for SAML later on.

Default response is XML but butting objects.json? will switch to JSON representation.

The REST War-file is designed to live outside the content server. Important if you want to place it in another part of the DMZ to allow mobile access.

DQL is right now read-only operations. Done using HTTP GET.