Documentum Training, Day 2

I'm a little late, but here are my notes for the Tech Fundamentals training for Documentum, days 2. It's a 3 day course. This will be followed my notes from the 2 day System Administration course. These are mostly just raw notes. Not intended as entertaining literature :-) Again, there are a lot of comparisons to Livelink here as that's the world I come from and understand as it pertains to ECM. Of course, I've also tinkered with Alfresco but nothing serious (yet).

Yumm. More free coffee.

There interesting separation of "client capability" versus privileges (server side).

Privileges are summed using powers of 2. I think this is the same type of math that OpenText Livelink uses for permissions. I remember working with my colleague a time or 2 to write reports that would scan our folder taxonomy trying to figure out how to report on permissions. It wasn't easy. So, the concept goes something like this:
create type (1) + create cabinet (2) = 3 in db.

Distinction: sysadmin and superuser. superuser is most powerful, can delegate priv's to sysadmin. sysadmin is similar to a livelink admin, but perhaps a little more powerful?

You can get to the DQL editor (if you have permission) by holding down Control on your keyboard and selecting File | About webtop. But, what's more interesting is that they also included a API tester. Wow..

Groups seem much more robust than Livelink. There are more options. In Livelink, have the concept of roles in project workspaces only. In Livelink's Enterprise workspace, the concept is permission based only (without customization). In Documentum, you can use roles pretty much everywhere. And, the delegation of group membership and such looks better than what Livelink offers with it's Group Leader feature. But wait. Roles don't have any special meaning with the out of the box Webtop application. You'd have to customize Webtop to look at it as a role and do something with that. Otherwise, it's really just treated like a group. This gives you a way to separate groups out from roles as a programmer. Furthermore, this gives you something over and above the default built-in client capabilities. Otherwise Webtop just treats it like a normal group.

Dynamic groups. Fascinating concept. Potential members of a group. If an application can detect where the user is connecting from, the application can say "this user is a member of this group" otherwise no access. You MUST already be a potential member of the group. And it must be a custom application. Out of the box Webtop isn't going to take advantage of this. It makes it easier for your custom application to take advantage of this requirement by setting up dynamic groups.

Permissions sets. The key point here is that ACL's are templates and are reusable. That is VERY different from Livelink. Let me break it down so my brain can get it.

• It's like a permissions set is a template that you apply to different objects where Livelink's ACL's are applied to objects but are not reusable.


• There are system permission sets and user perm sets.


• If you modify the permission set on on a folder, it doesn't affect or restrict a document inside unless you propagate that down. and it doesn't seem that you can do that with the UI. I think you'd have to do that with DQL? If so, that's a weakness when compared to LL as LL has a cool interface to propagate permission changes to children. However, Livelink would tell you to never modify the database. So, the DQL option wins out for flexibility.


• You can apply permissions to a specific object. These are custom permissions sets. This is more what Livelink is. But it's not going to be a best practice. If you modify the properties on an object, you can modify the permissions, for a temporary use as an example. It will create a "custom pemmission set". It will be a throwaway and create some sort of name like "dm_4500000abcs", etc.

The overview of search in class seems adequate. It doesn't sound like they have an equivalent to the Livelink query language. In order words, their advanced search has some neat-o form based thinger. And, you can save searches, etc. However, I do see where you could explicitly define a search expression against the index. Maybe I just need to look at it more. Also, our instances didn't include a full text index of the Docbase.

I asked about WebPublisher. Per trainer, this tool is geared towards the non-html folks.

Example: press releases, use template(s). marketing folks fill it out..
Webpublisher has built in review/approval process and the content gets pushed out/expired at the right time. There's a 3 day course on WebPublisher.

In short, WebPublisher templates are usually represented as XML and are transformed. Of course, they can be pages that access a Docbase from front to back with no replication at all. It's flexible. It can also be done with static HTML but will not be as flexible and will look a lot like the way it does in WebPublisher. I asked about skill level. It would not typically take a programmer to do the templates. You just need knowledge of HTML and of course a little XML. So, an analyst could do this. If the template is complex enough, you might need someone with a little more skill. That's probably the most info you're gonna get without training or reading the docs.