The New Generation of Solution Ready Products

This blog post is also posted on the Documentum Blog on the EMC Community Network.

It has been almost a year since we acquired the D2 technology and xCP 2.0 has reached the key milestone of release candidate and will be released later this year. With these 2 products, EMC IIG has an extraordinary technology stack.

D2 is not only a great portal interface, it is an amazing rules engine for content. xCP 2.0 is a best of breed application composition platform for custom line of business applications that need to leverage content, process and analytics. Both of them are built on a great platform. Ahson Ahmad recently wrote about the enhancements we have made to our platform with Documentum D7.

D2 Configuration - The Rules Engine for Content

At the heart of Documentum D2 is a powerful rules engine for content that helps address some of the key shortcomings encountered in ECM projects:

• Fast time to value. Through rapid configuration of information management rules, content applications can be rapidly configured to meet business requirements.
• Consistent information rules and governance. This is critical to the success of an ECM project. Without proper information rules, a content repository is not much better than a file share. It quickly becomes another digital landfill where information gets added but cannot be found nor leveraged. Successful ECM implementations leverage context, content, and user actions to classify information and trigger the right policies (security, metadata, etc.). However, in order to drive adoption, it is critical to minimize the user actions needed. D2 provides a high level of configurability to minimize user actions and maximize user acceptance and productivity.
• Great user experiences. User experience is paramount to user acceptance. To that effect, it is important to be able to create modern, responsive and contextual user experiences for accessing content.  D2 leverages the power of its configuration engine to enable highly contextual user interfaces. Its widget based user interface provides a highly flexible paradigm to create composite views of information.

xCP Designer - Advanced Custom Applications Built Without Coding

With xCP 2.0, we have rethought the way advanced custom applications get built without coding.  The xCP 2.0 Designer provides a unified application composition environment to model the information, business logic and processes that interact with information, integrate with external systems, leverage process and content analytics and rapidly compose the application user interface.  Content analytics is at the heart of building information models with xCP 2.0 providing the ability to semantically extend information models and leverage discovered metadata throughout the application.

What does this mean for you?

So what does this mean for your business? And how can this accelerate the delivery of tangible solutions to your business problems?  Let's explore the implications for different stakeholders:

1. If you are a line of business unit: Businesses have immediate problems that need to be solved.  Off-the-shelf solutions provide accelerated time to value to address a specific class of problems.  Leveraging a solution platform enables the rapid configuration of these solutions.  This provides significantly more flexibility that traditional packaged applications.  Craig Le Clair, from Forrester Research, frames it quite well in his "Stuck in Cement: When packaged apps create barrier to innovation" research. In concrete terms, how quickly can an energy company deploy a plant and facility management solution to support the construction of an oil rig or a refinery?  What solution can they use to manage the Standard Operating Procedure for operating drilling equipment?
   
   
   
   
   EMC IIG provides productized solutions to deliver such value for the Energy and Life Science industries.
   
   
   
   
   IIG Partners solutions provide EMC Certified Business Solutions to accelerate time to value for a wide spectrum of business transformation initiatives: from the tactical and operationally focused (for instance cost reduction initiatives) to the strategic and transformation looking to drive value innovation (for instance looking to enable new ways of doing business).
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. If you are a line of business IT: Line of business IT needs to respond rapidly to changes in the business environment without needing to undertake higher risk and lengthy customization projects.  Both D2 configuration capabilities and xCP application design environment enable Line of Business IT to quickly evolve their applications while minimizing both cost and risk.  In addition, EMC OnDemand provides a cost effective deployment model for rapidly standing up new business solutions and can be a cost effective option for complementing corporate IT services.
   
   
   
   
   
3. If you are corporate IT offering shared services: Corporate IT can offer a shared service infrastructure that can be quickly adapted to serve the needs of business units.  Leveraging both the D2 and xCP infrastructure, corporate IT can create an application factory as a shared service, and offer such platform as a service where multiple applications can be deployed on a shared infrastructure.  In addition, investments made to tightly integrate with VMware private cloud technologies provide additional flexibility for managing such shared application infrastructure.
   
   
   
   
   
   

In Summary

In summary, with a significantly refreshed product portfolio, EMC Documentum brings unprecedented flexibility to its customers and accelerated time-to-value with IIG and partners solutions.  Our commitment to deliver the best of breed products and solutions to our customers has never been stronger.

Take the Journey to No Coding through Configuration and Composition

This blog post is also posted on the Documentum Blog on the EMC Community Network.

Since its early days, Documentum has recognized the need to track and manage intellectual property and information. In the mid-1990s, Documentum focused on solving these customer problems targeting one industry at a time. It targeted manufacturing for managing training publications and life sciences for automating the process of assembling new drug applications.  The result of this approach was a variety of custom applications that provided significant value to a specific business area but were not easily re-purposed in other areas.

Today, EMC Information Intelligence Group (IIG) customers have more complex information management needs and the end users of these applications have become much more demanding. The new user, as we like to call her, is impatient. She has work to get done. She needs simplicity, ease of use and anywhere access to information. The business on the other hand requires more sophistication and control. And they want their investment to matter.  They want people to use that application they just built…

So, what we see is our customers seeking the powerful benefits of highly tailored clients and applications with custom functionality, and automated, integrated business processes. As if this new user shift was no hard enough, it is also compounded by increasing economic pressure on the buyer and IT. These factors are what have shaped our Documentum clients and application strategy. We are doubling down on configuration and composition and taking our customer on a Journey to No Coding.

Why? And what is composition anyway? And how is it different from configuration?

Through composition, our customers can leverage an integrated application building environment that enables them to rapidly deliver a highly tailored business application combining ECM and BPM.   That’s the value offered by EMC Documentum xCP.  xCP applications are easily upgradeable, leverage built-in best practices, and provide significant business value for applications that integrate content, process, people, and systems.

For most ECM requirements, we recommend configuration with EMC Documentum D2.  Unlike an application built with xCP, which is tailored for a particular business process, D2 is a general purpose ECM client designed by EMC IIG.  Where other ECM clients provide an API for customizing the application, D2 can be rapidly configured, with no coding, to satisfy 80%+ of your ECM needs.  The result is superior user experience and consistency with minimal effort to maintain, enabling tremendous time to value.

Sounds too good to be true?

Try it for yourself. Both D2 and xCP are available today, and our team is hard at work to take that story to the next level this year.

So, will you take the Journey to No Coding with us?

CenterStage: A Technical Overview

Cross posting from my blog post on the EMC Knowledge Worker blog.

With CenterStage, EMC delivers an interactive web experience, together with the associated computational resources and web services, for accessing and managing communities and team workspaces within the framework of an enterprise information infrastructure. Designed as a rich internet application, CenterStage leverages AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and web services to provide a dynamic user experience. Let's take a look at CenterStage high level architecture:


For version 1.0 release of CenterStage, two CenterStage clients will be made available in Q1 2009: CenterStage Essentials and CenterStage Pro. CenterStage Essentials provides basic content services; CenterStage Pro builds upon CenterStage Essentials to provide rich Web 2.0 and Social Networking capabilities. CenterStage Pro leverages CenterStage Essentials sub-systems and builds upon them.

Server Infrastructure
CenterStage leverages the robust customization infrastructure of the EMC Documentum Platform components as well as core services to provide both data model and services.
The following server components are provided with CenterStage:

• Content server - This core server component provides data model management, security services and content management services
• Full text index - Provides CenterStage with full-text search functionality
• Thumbnail generator - This component generates thumbnails for common file formats. More advanced rendition capabilities (advanced formats, multi-paging) require customers to upgrade to the CTS framework and its Media Transformation Services (MTS) or Advanced Documents Transformation Services (ADTS)
• Federated search - Allows users to aggregate searches across multiple sources. CenterStage Pro will provide search adapters for Google, ODBC/JDBC, Open Directory, and Open Search to name a few
• Classification and Entity Extraction - The classification and entity extraction server components extract metadata from the content being uploaded in CenterStage based on semantic analysis of the content itself. The extracted metadata provides additional dimensions used by users to filter content

In addition to the above server components, the following modules need to be deployed to support CenterStage functionality:

• Collaboration services: Provide the core collaboration infrastructure and is also used as the underpinning for the collaboration functionality available in Webtop
• Rich media and transformation services: Support the ability to preview content in context within CenterStage
• Extended search services: Provide the core set of services for search and clustering capabilities
• CenterStage Essentials and Pro services: Provide the additional core services and data model for both CenterStage Essentials and Pro

Services Infrastructure
CenterStage application services are built on top of Documentum Foundation Services (DFS) providing CenterStage with a strong service orientation . CenterStage application services provide coarse-grained APIs built to address the needs of the user interface. Elements of the services infrastructure include:

• The Rich Content Management Platform (RCMP) services, which handles the presentation layer requirement for:
  • Component delivery - the component registry and configuration management for the various UI components (or Widgets) exposed in the CenterStage UI
  • Container manager: the infrastructure for managing the user interface layouts
  • Bundle support: the packaging and deployment model leveraging OSGi at its core
• The CenterStage Essentials and Pro application services which provide a broad set of APIs to address the needs of the user interface and support its team productivity, information discovery, business process and web 2.0 functionality

User Interface Infrastructure
Built as a true rich internet application, CenterStage leverages browser - based technology to bind to the proper services and render the user interface:

• A thin UI infrastructure allows CenterStage to render the layout definition provided by the services. Service binding is achieved via either DWR (Direct Web Remoting), REST or SOAP depending on the UI technology leveraged in a particular UI widget. CenterStage leverages the ExtJS toolkit for most its user interface, but widgets can be built using a different UI technology such as Flex.
• A plugin infrastructure is also provided to enable seamless integration with the desktop when working with files.

Many of the architectural subsystems described above are in place in CenterStage Essentials Beta. Other sub-systems will be introduced with the formal release of CenterStage. Building upon the strength of the EMC Documentum Platform and standard rich internet technologies, CenterStage will provide a strong foundation for social, intelligent content enabled applications.

Have you heard of CenterStage?

CenterStage is EMC Documentum next generation information workplace that will provide an integrated end user experience that's contextual, visual, multi-modal and personal. CenterStage will include two offerings:

• CenterStage Essentials: a free client that requires the Documentum Content Server and provides basic content services functionality
• CenterStage Pro: the full Web 2.0 client built upon CenterStage Essentials and the Documentum ECM platform.

CenterStage Essentials Beta will be announced with EMC Documentum 6.5 launch. We have also created a community on labs.emc.com to manage the beta program. Join us there.