EMC delivers version 6.5 of Documentum ECM Suite

Web 2.0 enables new ways for people to work and collaborate. However, security and compliance concerns are preventing many organizations from fully embracing Web 2.0 technologies or worse, leaving them open to risks as end users experiment with applications on their own. In addition, the volume of incoming information from Web 2.0 applications is equally threatening and requires that systems scale to meet the increased performance demands of a Web 2.0 world.

"The explosion of digital content combined with the ease of use of Web 2.0 and social computing fuel users' expectations for how technology should work and how they should access information. As a result, IT is faced with a new challenge of meeting these heightened expectations while providing a secure information infrastructure,"

said Melissa Webster, Program Vice President, Content & Digital Media Technologies at IDC.

"The next generation of ECM needs to provide business users with appealing and flexible content-enabled solutions while ensuring that IT continues to maintain control by mitigating these new elements of risk," she added.

Documentum ECM 6.5 introduces several key innovations that deliver a rich Web 2.0 user experience and enhanced XML capabilities, while delivering improved enterprise performance and scalability, federated records management as well as accelerated transactional business processes. For the first time, companies will be able to leverage the appeal of newer technologies for users, improve the existing content applications already in use, and power all of these with a more scalable and secure ECM platform than ever before available.

"With the release of Documentum ECM 6.5, EMC is raising the bar for the next generation of enterprise content management,"

said Mohammed Amin, Regional Manager, EMC Middle East & North Africa.

"We're delivering a balance of the best experience for users with the control and performance IT needs to sustain a scalable and secure information infrastructure," he added.

Rich Web 2.0 User Experience

In today's Web 2.0 world, companies are required to provide a set of user experiences that enable employees to work with corporate information the way they work with personal information - easy to use, easy to find and easy to interact with others. By marrying the best of the user experience models with robust ECM capabilities, Documentum ECM 6.5 extends the value of ECM to a much broader set of users, creating new ways for them to work and collaborate.

Key products in Documentum ECM 6.5 that provide users with a rich Web 2.0 experience include:

- Documentum CenterStage Essentials, a new client for knowledge workers which is being released as a free online beta. The completely redesigned interface is extremely easy to use and features shared team workspaces, guided search and simple Documentum access.
- Documentum Media WorkSpace, a new rich media interface which provides users a highly personalized, dynamic and familiar way to view, find, compare, annotate, review and share rich media assets.
- My Documentum, a new lightweight client that is completely integrated with the desktop providing users with immediate access to the latest versions of content they use most often as well as allowing them to access and work on documents when they are not connected to the server.
- Documentum Web Publisher Page Builder, a newly designed, Flex-based Web authoring interface provides non-technical business users authors with interactive and easy to use tools to create compelling Web experiences.
- An enhanced Documentum TaskSpace delivers a highly configurable, all-in-one user experience that combines content, process, high-fidelity forms and monitoring to accelerate business processes and substantially increase user productivity.

End-to-End XML Ready

Community based authoring, which is common in Web 2.0 technologies, is changing the format and increasing the amount of content being generated. Users expect content to be automatically delivered, combined, and repurposed as digital mash-ups to suit the personalized context in which they work. XML is a key enabler for achieving this flexibility by allowing highly granular access to and assembly of all types of information.

The enhanced XML capabilities in Documentum ECM 6.5 are delivered through Documentum XML Store, a new native XML database available within the Documentum platform and related content delivery applications. A market first, EMC provides an integrated, end-to-end solution for creating, managing, accessing, archiving and delivering XML alongside all other types of enterprise content. Documentum's XML capabilities consist of robust management of XML documents and components, high-performance search and query of XML content, dynamic delivery and content transformation applications for content repurposing and personalized publishing as well as solutions for Technical Publications (DITA) and Aerospace and Defense (S1000D).

Improved Enterprise Performance and Scalability

The Documentum ECM 6.5 platform also allows IT to address today's exploding content requirements while enhancing enterprise performance, security and compliance. EMC's Documentum High-Volume Server delivers a centralized and optimized set of services for mass-volume applications such as archiving and transactional content applications. The High Volume Server provides high speed ingestion, batch processing, lightweight footprint for metadata and data partitioning—all designed to serve the needs of extremely high volume applications.

To make it significantly easier to work with rich media files as they increase from megabytes and gigabytes to even terabytes in size, EMC AVALONidm is now integrated with the Documentum digital asset management products. This enables seamless and automated management of business policies and movement of large video content across tiered storage.

"Version 6.5 of the Documentum ECM Suite continues to live up to the performance and scalability that we've come to expect from the Documentum platform," said Chris Campbell, a Documentum architect at FirstCommand Financial Services.

"Its ability to support high-volume transactional and archive environments makes it our unified platform of choice for ECM," Campbell added.

Limitless Records Management

EMC Documentum Federated Records Services (FRS) extends records management capabilities to provide a single system of record for business content that needs to be preserved for governance and compliance purposes, regardless of location or system. FRS enables content that resides in other repositories to be managed by Documentum allowing improved policy enforcement and management, improved compliance and records capture and lowered cost of discovery. With FRS, customers can preserve the investment they've made in third party records and retention management systems, rather than replacing them.

Accelerating Transactional Business Processes

The Documentum ECM 6.5 also includes enhancements to EMC's Documentum Process Suite designed to expand the user experience in constructing and delivering process-centric applications in a Web 2.0 world. EMC Documentum Forms Builder now enables the creation of high-fidelity electronic forms that truly resemble their paper counterparts—without the associated bottlenecks, overhead costs and risk. Also included are bar code and electronic signature support, as well as automatic field validation, offline support and intuitive graphical design tools.

EMC Documentum Business Activity Monitor (BAM) has significant enhancements that utilize Flex-based technologies to deliver business performance dashboards that provide interactive charts and graphs indicating process status, bottlenecks and other business performance events. Dashboards are updated in real time and are embedded within Documentum TaskSpace to provide a single point of control for business processes.

All products in Documentum ECM 6.5 will be available July 31, 2008 except for CenterStage Essentials and My Documentum, which will be available later in the current quarter (Q3 2008).