EMC Dives Deep Into Documentum

LAS VEGAS -- EMC is planning a whole host of Web 2.0 enhancements to its Documentum product line over the next 12 months, according to Mark Lewis, president of the vendors content management and archiving division.

“You will be amazed by the new levels of useability in the content management products we’re introducing, [and] also the use of Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures to connect our products together,” Lewis said during a presentation at EMC World yesterday.

EMC has more than 100 different products within its sprawling Documentum family, but Lewis identified four key areas where the vendor will focus its efforts. These are: transactional content management, information compliance, enhanced features for "knowledge workers," and interactive content management.

Transactional content management
Advanced data capture features will be added to Captiva in the third quarter of this year, enabling users to capture more data from both digital and traditional print forms. Also during the quarter, the vendor will unveil version 6.5 of its TaskSpace workflow software, containing a new user interface and something called Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), which aims to boost workflow efficiency.

This will be followed, in the fourth quarter, by "Project Athena," which Lewis described as the vendor’s “next-generation” capture technology -- clearly a souped-up version of Captiva.“There’s a great deal of SOA enablement [and] a lot more interconnectivity and interoperability with our core Documentum product set."

Information compliance
“This is the area where we want to help our customers make money with their information, but we also want to help them stay out of jail,” quipped Lewis, explaining that, in the third quarter, EMC will unveil its Documentum Archive, which is tightly integrated with technologies such as e-discovery.

During the same quarter, the vendor will also announce federated retention services. These give users the ability to set retention times and lifespans on documents and files that may reside outside Documentum, according to Lewis.

In the fourth quarter EMC will launch a technology code-named "Project Janus," which Lewis describes as an “email connection into the archive environment,” encompassing e-discovery, Exchange, and Lotus Notes.

Knowledge workers
First up is a free software client code-named "Project Magellan," which compiles information from Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, and mashups for the Documentum repository.The beta version of Project Magellan will be available in the third quarter, with the enterprise offering launched in the first quarter of next year.

Other products planned in this space include My Documentum, which will be be unveiled in the third quarter, as a way for users to access Documentum data even when they are off line.

In the fourth quarter, EMC will also announce a software client that integrates natively with Documentum. “We have a lot of clients that work in Outlook, and they want their content repository and their file system built into Outlook."

Interactive content management
This group of technologies is mainly focused on storing and publishing rich media.

The third quarter will see the launch of a technology called Media Workspace, which manages image, video, and textual data. EMC will also roll out an XML-based Web publishing tool during the same quarter.“Technologies like XML will really change the game for how information is shared and managed,” explained Lewis. “You can store these documents as a Web service in open constructs like XML.”

In the following quarter EMC will take the wraps off a technology code-named "Avalon," [ed. note: What? No "Project"?] which is essentially a Digital Asset Manager (DAM) for handling large files.

EMC’s fire-hose of Documentum announcements comes after IT managers and CIOs have urged the vendor to boost the technology, citing the need for better user interfaces and growing pressure to link their data with other systems via SOAs.

Encryption partnership with Brocade

Document management is not the only technology EMC is touting at its annual user event, and the vendor announced a partnership with Brocade today, which it claims will simplify data security.As part of the alliance, the two vendors will integrate technologies from EMC's RSA security division, including RSA's Key Manager for the Datacenter solution, with the fabric-based encryption technology that Brocade is developing.

EMC already has an OEM relationship with Brocade for its SAN switches and directors, which are offered as part of its Connectrix family, although the two vendors are touting their encryption partnership as a way for users to protect more data with less management time and resource.

Yesterday, EMC also announced tighter integration between its Smarts Application Discovery Manager (ADM) and VMware.

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