Tag: EMC World

EMC World 2010: Next-generation Search: Documentum Search Services

Presented by Aamir Farooq

Verity: Largest ingex 1 M Docs

FAST: Largest Index 200 M Docs

Challenging requirements today that all requires tradeoffs. Instead of trying to plugin third party search engines chose to build and integrated search engine for content and case management.

Flexible Scalability being promoted.

Tens to Hundreds of Millions of objects per host

Routing of indexing streams to different collections can be made.

Two instances can be up and running in less than 20 min!

Online backup restore is possible using DSS instead of just offline for FAST

FAST only supported Active/Active HA. In DSS more options:

Active/Passive

Native security. Replicates ACL and Groups to DSS

All fulltext queries leverage native security

Efficient deep facet computation within DSS with security enforcement. Security in facets is vital.

Enables effective searches on large result sets (underpriveleged users not allowed to see most hits in result set)

Without DSS, facets computed over only first 150 results pulled into client apps

100x more with DSS

All metrics for all queries is saved and can be used in analytics. Run reports in the admin UI.

DSS Feature Comparison

DSS supports 150 formats (500 versions)

The only thing lacking now is Thesaurus (coming in v 1.2)

Native 64-bit support for Linux and Windows, Core DSS is 64-bit)

Virtutalisation support on VMWare

Fulltext Roadmap

DSS 1.0 GA compatible with D 6.5 SP2 or later. Integration with CS 1.1 for facets, native security and XQuery)

Documentum FAST is in maintenance mode.

D6.5 SP3, 6.6 and 6.7 will be the last release that support FAST

From 2011 DSS will be the search solution for Documentum.

Index Agent Improvements

Guides you through reindexing or simply processing new indexing events.

Failure thresholds. Configure how many error message you allow.

One Box Search: As you add more terms it is doing OR instead of AND between each terms

Wildcards are not allowed OOTB. It can be changed.

Recommendations for upgrade/migration

  • Commit to Migrate
  • No additional license costs – included in Content Server
  • Identity and Mitigate Risks
  • 6.5 SP2 or later supported
  • No change to DQL – Xquery available.
  • Points out that both xDb and Lucene are very mature projects
  • Plan and analyze your HA and DR requirements

Straight migration. Build indices while FAST is running. Switch from FAST to DSS when indexing is done. Does not require multiple Content Servers.

Formal Benchmarks

  • Over 30 M documents spread over 6 nodes
  • Single node with 17 million documents (over 300 Gb index size)
  • Performance: 6 M Documents in FAST took two weeks. 30 M with DSS also took 2 weeks but with a lot of stops.
  • Around 42% faster for ingest for a single node compared to FAST

The idea is to use xProc to do extra processing of the content as it comes into DSS.

Conclusion

This is a very welcome improvement for one of the few weak points in the Documentum platform. We were selected to be part of the beta program so I would now have loved to tell you how great of an improvement it really is. However, we were forced to focus on other things in our SOA-project first. Hopefully I will come back in a few weeks or so and tell you how great the beta is. We have an external Enterprise Search solution powered by Apache Solr and I often get the question if DSS will make that unnecessary. For the near future I think it will not and that is because the search experience is also about the GUI. We believe in multiple interfaces targeted at different business needs and roles and our own Solr GUI has been configured to meet our needs based from a browse and search perspective. From a Documentum perspective the only client today that will leverage the faceted navigation is Centerstage and that is focused on asynchronous collaboration and is a key component in our thinking as well, but for different purposes. Also even though DSS is based on two mature products (as I experienced at Lucene Eurocon this week) I think the capabilities to tweak and monitor the search experience at least initially will be much better in our external Solr than using the new DSS Admin Tool although it seems like a great improvement form what the FAST solution offers today.

Another interesting development will be how the xDB inside DSS will related to the “internal” XML Store in terms of integration. Initially they will be two servers but maybe in the future you can start doing things with them together. Especially if next-gen Documentum will replace the RDBMS as Victor Spivak mentioned as a way forward.

At the end having a fast search experience in Documentum from now is so important!

Further reading

Be sure to also read the good summary from Technology Services Group and Blue Fish Development Group about their take on DSS.

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EMC World 2010: Chiming in with Word of Pie about the future of Documentum

We have got a written reaction to Mark Lewis’ keynote held at EMC World 2010 in Boston. I both feel and have the passion around Enterprise Content Management and it is great that Laurence Hart spent so much time and effort on talking to people to craft this post. Someone need to say things even if they are not always easy to hear. So I will try to not repeat what he said in this blog post but rather try to provide my perspective which comes from what I have learned about Information and Knowledge Management over the past years. ECM and Documentum is a very critical component to move that IKM vision from the Powerpoint stage into reality. In our case an experimentation platform that allows to put our ideas to improve the “business” of staff work in a large military HQ into something people can try, learn and be inspired from. Also, this turned out to be a long blog post which calls for an summary on top:

The Executive Summary (or message to EMC IIG) of this blog post:

  • Good name change but make sure You live up to your name.
  • A greater degree of agility is very much needed but do not simplify the platform so much that implementing an ECM-strategy is impossible.
  • Case Management is not the umbrella term, it is just one of many solutions on top of Documentum xCP
  • The whole web has gone Social Media and Rich Media. The Enterprise is next. Develop what You have and stay relevant in the 2010-ies!
  • Be more precise when it comes to the term “collaboration”. There is a whole spectrum to support here.
  • Be more bold and tell people that Documentum offers an unique architectural approach to informtion management – stop comparing clients.
  • Tell people that enabling Rich Media, Case Management, E 2.0 and (Team) Collaboration on one platform is both important and possible.
  • I am repeating myself here: You want to sell storage, right? Make sure Video Management is really good in Documentum!

The name change

Before I start I just need to reflect on the name change from Content Management and Archiving into Information Intelligence Group (IIG). I agree with Pie…the had to be changed to make it more relevant in 2010 and a focus on information (as in information management which is more than storage ILM) is the right way to go. The intelligence part of it is of course a bit fun because of my own profession but still it implies doing smart things with information and that should include everything from building context with Enterprise 2.0 features to advanced Content and Information Analytics. You have the repository to store all of that – now make sure you continue to invest in analytics engine to generate structure and visualisation toolkit to make use of all the metadata and audit trails. Maybe do something with TIBCO Spotfire.

Documentum xCP – lowering the threshold and creating a more agile platform

Great. Documentum needs to be easier to deploy, configure and monitored. Needed to get know customers on board easier and make existing ones be able to do smarter things with it in less time. However, it is easy to fall into the trap of simplifying things to much here. To me there is nothing simple around implementing Enterprise Content Management (ECM) as a concept and as a method in an organization. One major problem with Sharepoint and other solutions is that they are way to easy to install so people actually are fooled into skipping the THINKING part of implementing ECM and think it is just “next-next-finish”. All ECM-systems needs to be configured and adapted to fit the business needs of the organisation. Without that they will fail. xCP can offer a way to do that vital configuration (preceeded by THINKING) a lot more easier and also more often. We often stress how it is important to have the technical configuration move as close to any changes in Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) as possible. If Generals want to change the way they work and the software does not support it they will move away from using the software. Agility is the key.

In our vision the datamodel needs to be much more agile. Value lists need to updated often – sometimes based on ad hoc folksonomy tagging. Monitoring of the use of metadata and tags will drive that. Attributes or even object types need to be updated more often. Content need to be ingested quickly while providing structure later on (think XML Store with new schemas here). xCP is therefore a welcome thing but make sure it does not compromise the core of what makes Documentum unique today.

The whole Case Management thing

Probably the thing that most of us reacted against in the Mark Lewis Keynote was the notion that ECM-people in reality just have done Case Management all the time. I recently spend some time reflecting on that in another blog post here called “Can BPM meet Enterprise 2.0 over Adaptive Case Management?“. There is clearly a continuum here between supporting very formal process flows and very ad-hoc Knowledge Worker-style work. They clearly seem different and while they likely meet over Adaptive Case Management but to me it makes no sense to have that term cover the whole spectrum – even for EMC Marketing 🙂

I immediately saw that Public Sector Investigative work is often used as an example of Case Management. Case Management in especially done by law enforcement agencies is fundamentally different from work done by Intelligence Agencies because in Case-based Police investigations there is usually some legal requirement to NOT share information between cases unless authorised by managers. This is of not the case (!) for all Case Management applications but from a cultural perspective it is important that Case Management-work by the Police is not a line of business that should be used as an example of information sharing. It is even so that the underlying concept actually is at ends with any concept of unified enterprise content management strategy where information should be shared. That is why workgroup-oriented tools such as i2 Analyst’s Workstation have become so popular there.

The point here is that it is important to not disable sharing in the architectural level because again it is what constitutes a good ECM-system that content can be managed in a unified way. Don’t be fooled by requirements for that – use the powerful security model to make it possible. Then Law Enforcement Agencies can use it as well. However, there must be more to ECM than Case Management – as Word of Pie suggests it is just ONE of many solutions on top of the Documentum xCP platform. A platform which is agile enough to quickly build advanced solutions for ECM on top.

Collaboration vs Sharing and E.20

So, Collaboration is used everywhere now but the real meaning with it actually varies a bit. First there are two kind of collaboration modes:

  • Synchronous (real-time)
  • Asynchronous (non-real time – “leave info and pick up later)

Obviously neither Documentum nor Sharepoint is in real-time part of the business. For that you will need Lotus Sametime, Office Communications Server, Adobe Connect Pro or similar products. However, Google Wave provides a bit of confusion here since it integrates instant messaging and collaborative document editing/writing.

However, I am bit bothered by the casual notion of anything as a collaboration tool like Sharepoint and for that sake eRoom is getting. To further break this down I believe there is a directness factor in collaboration. Team collaboration has a lot of directness where you collaborate along a given task with collegues. That is not the same as many of the Social Media/Enterprise 2.0 features which does not have a clear recipient of the thing you are sharing. And sharing is the key since you basically are providing a piece of information in case anyone wants/needs it. That is fundamentally different from sending an email to project members or uploading the latest revision to the project’s space. Andrew McAffe has written about this concept and uses the concept of a bullseye representing strong and weak ties to illustrate this effect.

My point is that it is important that tools for team collaborations from an information architecture standpoint can become part of the more weaker indirect sharing concept. That is the vehicle to utilze the Enterprise 2.0 effect in a large enterprise. Otherwise we have just created another set of stove-pipes or bubbles of information that is restricted to team members. I am not saying that all information should be this transparent but I will argue that based on a “responsibility to provide”-concept (see US Intel Community Information Sharing Policy) restricting that sharing of information should be exception – not the norm.

Sure as Word of Pie points out in his article “CenterStage, the Latest ex-Collaboration Tool from EMC” there are definitely things missing from the current Centerstage release compared to both Sharepoint and EMC’s old tool eRoom. However, as Andrew Goodale points out in the comments I also think it is a bit unfair because both eRoom and at least previous versions of Sharepoint (which many are using) actually lacks all these important social media features that serves to lower the threshold and increase participation by users. They also provide critical new context around the information objects that was not available before in DAM, WebTop or Taskspace. Centerstage also provides a way to consume them in terms of activity streams, RSS-feeds and faceted search. Remember that Centerstage is the only way to surface those facets from Documentum Search Server today.

So, I am also a bit disappointed that things are missing in Centerstage that should be there and I also really want to stress the importance of putting resources into that development. Those features in there are critical for implementing all serious implementations of an ECM-strategy and the power of Documentum is that they all sits in the same repository architecture with a service layer to access them. Maybe partner with Socialcast to provide a best practice implementation to support a more extensive profile page and microblogging. Choose a partner for Instant Messaging in order to connect the real-time part of collaboration into the platform. Again, use your experience from records management and retention policies to make those real-time collaboration activities saved and managed in the repository.

Be bold enough to say you are an Sharepoint alternative – but for the right reasons

I’m not an IT-person, I come into this business with a vision change the way a military HQ handles information so I see Enterprise Content Management more as a concept than a technology platform. However, when I have tried to execute our vision it becomes very clear that there is a difference between technology vendors and I like to think that difference comes from internal culture, experience, and vision of the company. It is the “why” behind why the platform looks like it does and has the features it has. So as long you are not building everything from scratch for yourself it actually matters a lot which company you chose to deliver the platform to make your ECM vision happen. That means that there IS a difference between Documentum and Sharepoint in the way the platform works and we need to be able to talk about that. However, what I see now is that most people focus on the client side of it and try to embrace it is a popular collaboration tool. Note that I say tool – not platform. All those focuses on the client side of it where the simplified requirement is basically a need for a digital space to share some documents in. However, the differentiator is not whether Centerstage or Sharepoint meets that requirement – both do. The differentiator is whether you have a conceptual vision on how to manage the sum of all information that an organization have and to what degree those concepts can be implemented in technology. That is where the Documentum platform is different from other vendors and why it is different from Sharepoint. Sharepoint is sometimes a little bit to easy to get started with which unfortunately means there is no ECM-strategy behind the implementation and when the organisation have thousands of Sharepoint sites (silos) after a year or so that is when that choice of platform really starts to differ.

This week at EMC World has been a great one as usual and there is no shortage of brilliant technical skills and development of features in the platform. What I guess bothers me and some other passionate ECM/Documentum-people is the message coming out from the executive level at IIG. In the end, that is where the strategic resource decision are made and where the marketing message being constructed. I think now there is a lot more to do on the vision and marketing level than actually needs to be done on the platform itself. The hard part seem to be proud of what the platform is today, realize it’s potential to remain the most capable and advanced on the market and use that to stay relevant in many applications of ECM – not just Case Management.

Rich Media – A lot of content to manage and storage to sell

One of the strong points of Documentum is that it can manage ALL kind of content in a good way and that includes of course rich media assets such as photos, videos and audio files. Don’t look upon this as some kind of specialised market only needed by traditional “creative” markets. This is something everybody needs now. All companiens (and military units for that sake) have an abundance of digital still and video cameras where a massive amount of content needs to be managed just as all the rest of the content. There is a need for platform technologies that actually “understands” that content and can extract metadata from it so that this content can be navigated and found easily. It is also important to assist users in repurposing this content so it can be displayed easily without consuming all bandwith and also easily be included in presentations and other documents. This is also very much relevant from a training and learning perspective where screencams and recorded presentations has so much potential. It does not have to be a full Learning Management System but at least an easy way to provide it. Maybe have a look at your dear friend Cisco and their Show and Share application. Oh, it is marketed as a Social Video System – the connections to Centerstage (and not just MediaWorkspace) is a bit too obvious. Make sure you can provide Flickr and Youtube for the Enterprise real soon. People will love it. Again, on one very capable platform.

Media Workspace is a really cool application now. Even if it does not have all the features of DAM yet (either) it is such a sexy interface on Documentum. The new capabilites of handling presentations and video are just great. Be sure to look more at Apple iPhoto and learn how to leverage (and create) metadata to support management of content based on locations, people and events. A piece of cake on top of a Documentum repository. Now it is a bit stuck in the Cabinet/Folder hierarchy as the main browsing interface.

Summary

I agree with Word of Pie that there is a lack of vision – an engaging one that we all can buy into and sell back home to our management. In my project we seem to have such a vision and for us Documentum is a key part of that. I just hoped that EMC IIG would share that to a greater degree. From our responses back home in Sweden and here at EMC World people seem to both want and like it (have a look at my EMC World presentation and see what you think). We can do seriously cool and fun stuff that will make management of content so much more efficient which should be of critical importance for every organisation today. At least in the military one thing is for sure and that is that we won’t get more people. We really have to work smarter and that is what a vision like this will provide a roadmap towards.

So be proud of what you do best EMC IIG and make sure to deliver INTEGRATED solutions on top of that. For those who care that will mean a world of difference in the long run and will gather looks of envy for those who did not get it.

With Jamie Pappas in the Blogger’s Lounge at EMC World 2010

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.

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.

EMC World 2010: There is an App for Documentum now (iPhone OS)

Flatiron Solutions delivers an iPhone OS App for Documentum

So, finally I got to see it. Documentum on iPhone OS, running on both the iPhone and the iPad. I had said it before and say it again: from a information management perspective it makes so much sense to combine the intuitive interface of the iPhone OS with power that lies in a Documentum repository. Make use of all the metadata around content objects and exploring information becomes a breeze on a multi-touch device.

It is the company called Flatiron Solutions that brought this to market. You can download a version of it from the iTunes App Store. In order to connect your own repository you will need a server component that sits between the iPhone OS App and the Documentum repository.

Download the App from iTunes

I had a chance to try it out on both the iPhone and the iPad in their booth at the Solutions Pavillion last night and it was so fun. I really want this in our Battle Lab. A very sexy interface for Documentum!

EMC World 2010: My presentation around using Documentum in a SOA-platform

Yesterday on Monday May 10 at 11 am I gave a speech at the Momentum 10 conference here at EMC World 2010 in Boston. The presentation was focused around our experiences of building an experimentation platform for next-generation information and knowledge management (IKM) for a large operational level military HQ. Contemporary conflicts are complex and dynamic in character and requires a new approach to IKM in order to be able to handle all those complexities based on a sound management of our digital information. At the core of our platform is EMC Documentum integrated over an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) from Oracle. The goal is to maintain access and tracability on the information while removing stove-piped systems.

I have got quite a few positive reactions both from customers and EMC-people after the session which of course is just great. For instance see these notes from the session. All the presentations will be available for download for all participants but that will most likely take some time. So in the meantime you can download my presentation here instead:

Presentation at EMC World 2010 in Boston

Looking forward to comments are reflections. The file is quite big but that is because my presentations is high on screenshots and downsampling them to save file size will make it too hard to see what they are showing. Try zooming in to see details.

EMC World 2010: At Blogger’s Lounge

Sitting at the lounge now relaxing after another cup of great latte. Relaxing after what felt like a really good presentation earlier today at EMC World 2010. Responses so far have been very positive and it feels great of course. We think we have so many cool ideas and it is great to be able to show it off to people with a deep interest in Enterprise Content Management.

Alexandra Blogger's lounge at EMC World 2010

Now it is soon time for the keynot by Mark Lewis who seem to be in charge of the newly renamed Information Intelligence Group (formerly Content Management & Archiving Division).

EMC World 2010: DFS Real World Examples, Best Practices

I had planned to go to a session around the Documentum Roadmap but it was totally full so we had to go to another session. We split up and went to the BPM Fundamentals and the Documentum Foundation Services (DFS) Best Practices session by Michael Mohen instead. I am not a developer so this is a little from the 500ft level

He started by discussed the complementary nature between DFS and CMIS depending on how focused development is to only Documentum or not. CMIS is of course the new standard recently approved by OASIS. He argued that some applications like Records Management is still best done using DFS but I guess that also has to do with how people want CMIS to develop. As I understand it is not intended to contain ALL feature and the COMPLETE set of features in all ECM-systems and rather focus on the interoperabiltiy aspect of building ECM-apps based on multiple repositories.

When it comes to Content Transfer when using DFS the key considerations are latency, size of the file, formats and caching needs. Some of the ways to do content transfer is:

  • HTTP
  • Base64
  • UCF
  • MTOM

Most use UCF or MTOM  but it is important to remember that BOCS/ACS requires UCF to work. The message is to don’t be afraid to mix between HTTP, MTOM and others. In our solution we do use a mix but because we sometimes have rather large content size this of course an issue.

Notable changes in D6.5/D6.6

  • JBoss 4.2.0 is the new methods server
  • Apache Tomcat support
  • Aspect Support
  • LWSO support
  • Native 64-bit support and UCF Improvements
  • Kerberos is coming D6.6

Remote and local calls in Java – .Net does only provide remote calls

There are some applications that customers may not be aware of such as DFS Utilities developed by John sweeney, EMC and DFSX (Extension)

  • Provides utility classes
  • Based on DFS Object MOdel
  • Java-based 1.5 or greater
  • Only EAR-files today

Test Harness is JMeter extension which has custom JMeter Sampler built to invoke DFS using the Java Productivity Layer

Responsetimes collected for:

  • CreateObject
  • Get Object
  • Checkout object
  • Check in Object
  • Delete Object

Over a WAN DFS speeded up DFC especially when you have 300-400 ping times…use DFS because it is state-less. Relevant when using satellite links and such.

Sizing Calculator is soon available for DFS. It is an Excel spreadsheet. The sheet is sased on WSDL and SOAP so if we are using other designs results may vary of course.

In a speed test etween UCF and MTOM upload speeds under 50 Mb were similar. However, UCF was slightly faster. The cool part of UCF is that it is asynchronous which for instance mean that you can show one page of a document and continue loading the rest of it.

When it comes to ESB-implementations the message was that the majority of implementions is point-point for clients apps. However some have SAML for added security in their ESB implementation which affects speed a bit.

It seems that DFS is used a lot in a .Net environment and together with Sharepoint.

MOSS and DFS Examples

.Net 3.3

SDF and xCP

Webpart with an inbox rendered and Xform inside Sharepoint.

Another example is the use of DFS and Windows Explorer where some want custom integration for the Windows Desktop and essentially provides something like the old Document Desktop client. It is called DFS Explorer.

DFS Adobe Flex Example

There is an white paper available to provide a quickstart…read more about the session at the community page.

Adobe does not talk directly to DFS but through Java. Restful would much easier to use for Flex as well as most AJAX-implementations.

Best Practices

  • Leverage the SDK (.Net/Java interop layers)
  • Use UCF for BOCS/ACS
  • If you expected your query to exceed 500 you must cache and cycle through results.
  • DFS is better on WAN with poor latency.

A feature which is not well documented is to set requiresAuthentication=”false” on your annotated services implementation to browse through repositories and basic info such as data dictionary.

There is also a less known Services Catalog Viewer which is an optional install

  • Explore services available within the internet
  • DSCR is registry for consumer discover.
  • UDDI v2 standard
  • Standard Web app
  • Default port is 9010
  • Judy open source UDDI

You can also compare this with the notes from last conference by Word of Pie.