Documentum Training, Day 1

As twittered earlier today, I learned today that that Documentum's metaphors are not that different from those of OpenText Livelink. That's good. My brain still has a LOT of Livelink info on it and it's good to see it not wasted.

It seems everything in Documentum is an object, and it is all object oriented. That means new objects can be created using existing ones. Same concept in Livelink. In Documentum, you have cabinets. Livelink doesn't have that but it's probably closer to a Livelink workspace object or maybe even a domain. It' just a top level folder object.

I'm happy to see that they do have compound documents. But, they are called virtual folders in Documentum. Otherwise, it's the same concept.

Reports are possible. One of the things I REALLY liked about Livelink was the LiveReport object. Documentum has this ability. It might even be a bit better, because they abstract away the query language a bit with their DQL (Documentum Query Language). I'm sure I will have more to say on this in the next few days. What I'm wanting to know is can report results take on interesting results like graphs? With LiveReports you could use a handy little set of graphs to show things like a graph of the ten largest file types or the top 10 usage by department, etc. If it's not out of the box, I'm sure some 3rd party has a module for this.

It's interesting that a lifecycle option seems to be there out of the box with Documentum. As of 2005, I don't think this was out of the box with document management in LL.

Regarding version control, that seems to work OK. I was impressed with the idea of branching versions. If your document was at version 2.0 and you went back and checked-out version 1.1 and versioned it again, it branches it. Weird. I don't know that Livelink does this? Anyone know that for sure?

And what about modules? Livelink is all about modules. Or at least it used to be as of 2005. And it used to be all in OScript until they introduced Java modules. Documentum is more about "applications". I'm not in developer training but the "Intro" training then sysadmin training later this week. So, I probably will not get to the bottom of this until a bit later.

When I first lay eyes on "webtop" back in 2005, I was very disappointed. After today, I'm a bit impressed with version 6. I say "a bit", because I still believe that you should not mimic a file explorer inside a browser is not what we should be shooting for. That's probably why most organizations customize it and make their own Documentum application.

There's still a lot to be evaluated this week. Workflow and search are big pieces to the puzzle. Livelink's search engine was top notch and their workflow wasn't bad either. We'll see how Documentum measures up here.