Content Perspective

EMC World 2007 have come to an end and I am almost exhausted after many intensive sessions on different parts of the Documentum platform. And platform is the right word since there a large number of products/modules available that makes it possible set up the system to do just anything. Documentum 6 is of course a major release and there are many improvements. The user interface in WebTop have gotten a much needed redesign and now supports shortcut keyboard commands, right-click, multiselect and even better drag-and-drop. One cool feature is to drag a file from the desktop onto a file and WebTop automatically senses that you would like to do a check-in from file. Documentum Transformation Services have also seen an overhaul with new UI:s for managing transformation and editing profiles as well as a new component called XML Transformation Services using XSL-FO. Really powerful for automating publishing. Architecturewise (for the WebTop) the JNI have been taking away in favour for a pure Java solution that makes deployment better and more standardized. No more special installers for WebTop! Performance is also said to be better. Taskspace is also a welcome addition since it provides a streamlined view for people performing actions withing different workflows. Includes better sorting/filtering/searching as well as an embedded viewer for PDF and images. The search interface has also been improved and now features faceted navigation using what EMC calls clusters which is something I really look forward using. Finally I like to highlight the fact that Eclipse is now the preferred development environment for Documentum which means that we will see apps like Documentum Application Builder go away. Even more interesting stuff is coming in version 6.5 and the hints we got of Documentum 7 looks even more promising.

I also need to say something about the conference in general. It was incredibly well organized and I am amazed how they move 7000 people around with such ease. I can recommend it for anyone interesting in the nuts and bolts of Documentum.