Documentum extends open-source support

EMC is making its Documentum 6 content management software more customisable.

The upgrade is the second in EMC's major overhaul of Documentum. The first, revealed at the company's user conference in May, added a transactional content user interface called Documentum TaskSpace.

EMC said the centrepiece of the latest upgrade is Documentum Enterprise Content Services, a web services-based application programming interface (API) that simplifies task creation for developers via a standard interface, within a service-oriented architecture (SOA).

Creating this services interface was crucial in EMC's effort to replace the technology's proprietary code with a vendor-neutral framework, said Karin Ondricek, senior marketing manager at Documentum.

The update also adds Documentum Composer, which is built on top of the Eclipse open-source framework and can be used to build web services and configure a variety of applications.

However, Jorg Werner, manager of Document Management at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma, said another new feature - Documentum Branch Office Caching Services - is his favourite addition.

Documentum Branch Office Caching Services enables all common content management operations, such as read, write, edit, create and search, to occur locally for an end user, no matter where the software is housed, according to Ondricek.

Boehringer is currently running Documentum 5.0, and Werner said he expects the caching feature to significantly improve user productivity at remote facilities.

"We are distributed all over the globe. We have a couple of locations in Asia, South America and Europe, but where we are struggling most is in far sites, especially when you get to low bandwidth and long distance - they are hit with a latency effect," said Werner.

"This is where [employees] say sometimes they can not use 'System X' to their full extension that they would expect for document management because some actions take a few minutes," he noted. "This is why we are so keen on seeing Branch Office Services because for us, that really opens up a completely new dimension to make their life easier."

The new features will be available in late August.