Next Generation Documentum Clients: ECM 2.0

In the past, I've already reported about My Documentum (MyDocumentum) and Centerstage. Now, with the release getting closer, there is some more news about these clients.

General Acceptance release of both is September 1st. The release date has been pushed back, apparently due to the possible late addition of the Sharepoint Web parts to the My Documentum suite. EMC says not to be taking any chances with proper testing of the client applications...

The true innovation is CenterStage. But let's start with My Documentum.

My Documentum Suite

My Documentum is from a functional point of view nothing new, but it is, what is nicely called, a "marketing bundle". But a bundle with an appealing price tag.

What does the bundle contain?

• My Documentum for Outlook: The new and revamped DCO (Documentum Client for Outlook). DCO now integrates natively into Outlook and offers conflict resolution, version comparison, preview functionalities and a bunch of new goodies.
• My Documentum Offline: The Documentum Offline Client which was freely available with D6.0 SP1. The offline client offers quite good automatic synchronization functionalities.
• My Documentum for Desktop: This is the old FSS (FS2 or File Share Services) a pretty unknown product, which made it possible to map Documentum as a file share but was a hastle to install. FSS was part of AIS (Application Integration Services), but will be taken out of that offering.
• (My Documentum for Sharepoint: The old Sharepoint Web Parts are offered with this bundle. This is not certain yet.)

The My Documentum suite is aimed at the Microsoft user, who only uses standard MS apps to access his information.

CenterStage Essentials and Pro

But the real killer app is CenterStage. CenterStage will rock the industry, if it delivers what it is promising. CenterStage will be available in 2 flavours: Essentials and Pro. Where it was first said that CenterStage was going to be aimed at collaboration and the "basic" knowledge worker, it is now apparent that over time it will replace WebTop entirely. Which is a good thing.

The catch phrase is "The New Standard for Extended Enterprise Collaboration", but it seems to be offering quite a lot more than just collaboration. It looks like the ideal client to handle several functional needs.

So now for the characteristics:

• Essentials and Pro: The Essentials version will normally be included with a content server license. The Essentials version will only offer document management and document-oriented collaboration functionalities and the aim is to replace WebTop over time. The Pro version offers Wiki, Blog, Federated Search, mobile support and a whole bunch of other goodies.
• ECM 2.0: CenterStage not only offers Wikis and Blogs, but will also allow users to create their personal profile. That way, it will be easier to discover people's professional interests and skills.
• Flex: The user interface is flex based. It not only looks great, but it is user friendly as well.
• Contextual Search & Text Analysis: All documents are automatically indexed, analysed and categorized. That way, on performing a search, the search results can be scoped using different types of categories to which the search results apply.
• Federated Search: ECIS (Enterprise Content Integration Services), the federated search solution EMC bought from AskOnce, is going to be shipped with CenterStage Pro.
• Spaces: The old "cabinet" paradigm is replaced by spaces (Alfresco?), which allows for each space to have its own characteristics.

In my opinion, CenterStage could become a real unified ECM client. It already combines collaboration and DMS, why not add other disciplines?

PS: Another interesting newsbit is, that EMC is finally going to build it's own search engine based on Lucene (not just simply repackaging Lucene-