EMC unveils Documentum 6 platform

HOPKINTON, US: EMC Corporation, provider of information infrastructure solutions has today announced the EMC Documentum 6 enterprise content management (ECM) platform – enabling development, configuration, and deployment of enterprise content applications.

The Documentum 6 platform is a key piece of EMC’s Documentum suite, a broad spectrum of ECM products that include software covering transactional content management, archiving, knowledge worker, compliance, interactive content management, and platform infrastructure.

Core to the Documentum 6 platform is its new services-based API (application programming interface) as well as new development tools that together revolutionize Documentum-based application development and configuration.

Accompanying the launch, EMC today announced that it will offer up to $100,000 in cash prizes for winning participants of the EMC Documentum 6 platform Developers’ Challenge.

“With the release of the Documentum 6 platform, EMC continues to lead the industry into the next generation of enterprise content management, as it moves from a separate application platform to an integral part of an organization’s information infrastructure,” said Balaji Yelamanchili, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Content Management and Archiving at EMC. “By adopting a vendor-neutral, services-based approach to content management, EMC is truly changing the way organizations build, configure and deploy today’s content applications.”

“Enterprise information requirements - like regulatory compliance, eDiscovery readiness, corporate governance and others - cannot solely be met by basic content services (BCS) offerings today," said Toby Bell, VP at Gartner Research, Inc. "Therefore, companies are looking at enterprise content management as part of a strategy to build an information infrastructure that standardizes on services-based platforms, enables them to interconnect enterprise systems, data, and repositories, and lowers development costs while shortening the time to business value.”

The highly flexible Documentum 6 platform supports content management and archiving applications, supplying common tools and services to manage content, processes and repositories. Key innovations for the Documentum 6 platform include:

Documentum Enterprise Content Services: a new, Web Services-based API that simplifies development and integration with ready-to-use enterprise content services for easy integration with other enterprise applications within a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). EMC’s new services interface was redesigned to eliminate Documentum specific methods and terminology and replace it with a vendor-neutral framework for working with content management functionality. These services enable developers with no Documentum experience to build ECM applications quickly and easily. This open, generic approach eliminates the “knowledge barriers” that get in the way of incorporating ECM functionality in all enterprise applications and business processes that deal with content.

Documentum Composer: provides a standardized environment for development and configuration tools that reduce the need for coding and facilitates composition of applications with reusable elements -- making the design, customization, deployment and maintenance of content applications faster and easier.

Documentum Branch Office Caching Services: enables robust global scalability for enterprises with high-performance, remote application requirements by enabling all end-user operations - read, create, edit, version, search – to occur locally to a user, regardless of location, resulting in the fastest response times possible.

These infrastructure innovations combine to make it significantly easier to build, configure, and deploy content applications. Additionally, by standardizing enterprise-wide on a common architecture, there are both IT savings and business benefits as information access; business processes and corporate policies span multiple applications.

“As a globally distributed company and a long-time Documentum user, we are looking forward to the new features that will be included in Documentum 6 - particularly the Documentum Branch Office Caching Services and the Web-services based API,” said Doctor Jorg Werner, Manager of Document Management at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma GmbH & Co. KG.

“Some of our locations in Asia, South America and Eastern Europe couldn't use document management capabilities to their fullest extent because of issues with low bandwith or network latency. The branch office caching services should enable us to easily scale these capabilities to all our locations, allowing us to improve user productivity. We're also excited for the more service-oriented architecture. Our internal users have been asking for more functionality and interaction with their Intranet and Web portals. The Web-services based API of Documentum 6 will make it easier for different internal user groups to build their own requirements, such as contract management, into applications.”

The release is especially beneficial to EMC’s wide network of Documentum partners who build and implement solutions on the EMC Documentum platform.

“As a long-time EMC Documentum partner, iLog is extremely excited about the new Documentum 6 platform,” said Bounty Ing, Deputy CEO and EVP Asia Pacific, ILOG. “We plan to leverage the new Web services API to easily integrate our iLog BRMS with the Documentum 6 platform, which will allow our mutual customers to enhance their existing IT investments with additional flexibility, transparency and speed for faster time to market, while also meeting the SOA promise of reuse and agility.”