Documentum: An Introduction

Documentum: An Introduction

I have seen cases where many IT people misinterpret Documentum with Documentation, it may be due to their familiar sounding, but that was years back when I joined the IT Industry. In today's scenario, Documentum is an indispensable part of content management solutions.

Once, Documentum was the company, which was acquired by EMC in December 2003. Today, Documentum is the product of EMC for content management and one of the four EMC operating division.

Before starting with Documentum concepts, one should have some idea of content management.

Content Management

In my first article, I tried to shed some light on Content Management Click here for details. Content Management is a diversified domain, where each business has separate needs.

Where Documentum fits in?

Documentum is one of the most widely used Content management system available. So, why Documentum is so popular? To understand the vast applications of Documentum let us first start with some basics -

Content Server

Content Server is the core logic behind the content management. As name suggest it is the application engine which perform and provide all the content management tasks. Services provided by content server can be summarize as follows -

1.Standard Services - These are Out Of The Box services provided by Content Server -

a) Content Management

i) Content Storage and Retrieval

ii) Version Control of Content

iii) Data Dictionary

iv) Virtual Documents

v) Search Services

b) Process Management

i) Workflows

ii) Lifecycle

c) Security Management

i) Repository Level

ii) Object Level

iii) Auditing & Tracing

d) Distributed Content Management

2) Extended Services - These are additional add-on services which can be activated after proper license is acquired -

a) Trusted Content Service

b) Content Service for EMC Centera

c)Content Storage Service

d) XML Store and XQuery

3) Documentum Products - These are products which require activation on Content Server

a) Retention Policy Services

b) Collaboration Services

Above are the products associated with Content Server, there are products for Client based as well as Web based for different business needs.

Docbase/Repository

Docbase is synonymous to database in relational model. Repository is like a vault which stores content and associated metadata with them. Docbase is entity which represents the collection of all contents together with their metadata, configurations and content server defined objects. Each content server can have multiple repositories having there own table space and share of file system to store content.

Docbroker

Is like a name server which means that docbroker keeps all the information about docbases which are currently online. When docbroker start, the active docbases inform docbroker about there status and information like which port docbase is listening etc. Now, when a client makes a request, the docbroker propagate the list of available docbases to the application.

In the next chain of the article, I will try to explain more about above mentioned topic.

Please leave your candid opinion so I can include those in coming posts.