EMC on Monday unveiled several upgrades to its Documentum 6 (D6) enterprise content management offering that add improved customization and configuration flexibility.
The upgrade marks the second phase of EMC's major overhaul of Documentum. The initial upgrade, unveiled at the company's user conference in May, added a new transactional content user interface called Documentum TaskSpace.
EMC said the centerpiece of the latest upgrade is Documentum Enterprise Content Services, a new Web services-based application programming interface (API) that simplifies task creation for developers via a standard interface within a service-oriented architecture (SOA).
Creating the new services interface was crucial in EMC's effort to replace the technology's proprietary code with a vendor-neutral framework, noted 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 significant new D6 feature -- Documentum Branch Office Caching Services -- is the key addition for his firm.
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 the Ingelheim, Germany-based company's 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.