Documentum Compliance Manager (DCM) 6.5 Upgrade Thoughts

Published September 2, 2010 D6.5 , Document Control , Documentum , Upgrades Leave a Comment

Many Documentum Compliance Manager (DCM) 5.3 users are reaching a decision point on upgrading to DCM 6.5.  The typical driver is primary support for DCM 5.3 expired on 12/31/2009 while DCM 6.5 will be supported until 08/31/2012.  Typically DCM is used by companies operating in regulated industries (ex: pharmaceutical manufacturing) to meet regulatory requirements around managing their documentation (SOPs, Specifications, etc.) electronically.  The product consists of extensions of the current core Documentum client application, originally WorkSpace and currently Webtop, along with other software integrations to provide required features for document control including dynamically applied watermarks (PDFAqua), electronic signatures, security, lifecycle and other additions to the typical Documentum client.  Given reliance on Webtop, some common issues with DCM include:

  • Its tendency to lag behind in release dates compared to the rest of the product stack, evident with the late release of the 6.5 version
  • The general difficulty clients have had in upgrading between major releases.

This post will discuss some of the things to look for when considering the upgrade to 6.5.

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Documentum 6.5 Upgrade – Character Encoding Issues

Published August 26, 2010 D6 , D6.5 , Documentum , HPI , Lucene , Migrations , Open Source , OpenMigrate , Tech Tip , Upgrades , Webtop Leave a Comment

Special Note:  Anyone that is planning an upgrade from Documentum 5.3 to 6.5 should look closely at this note as some types of upgrades (clone or in-place) could result in content that was retrievable from 5.3 not being available in 6.5.

This post was developed based on recent work for a major pharmaceutical client.  The client, on Documentum 5.3, was developing a consumer interface application leveraging Lucene.  As we mentioned in a previous post, the client chose Lucene over FAST based on benchmarking results for over 150,000 documents.

Background

For the application, the client was leveraging OpenMigrate with DFC 6.5 to retrieve content and metadata for nearly 1,000,000 documents from their 5.3 docbase to be indexed in Lucene.  Per the product release notes, using DFC 6.5 to access a 5.3 repository is a supported configuration.  An issue was identified when around 5,000 documents failed to migrate.  In reviewing the error logs from OpenMigrate, the DFC call IDfSession.getObject() to retrieve documents from the repository resulted in errors.  After reviewing the stack trace, it was apparent that the error was being thrown from within the DFC code.  The team was surprised by the error since the documents were able to be retrieved without a problem using client applications working with a 5.3 DFC, such as Webtop and Samson.  The DFC error messages that were encountered are shown below:

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Documentum Health Check

Published August 25, 2010 Documentum , Tech Tip , Upgrades Leave a Comment

For many clients, one of our first projects is a Documentum Health Check.  This is typically a 2-3 day project where one of our technical architects will visit onsite to review all the different components of the Documentum environment.    We encourage this type of project as it allows us to be more pro-active with identifying possible issues rather than re-active when issues surface.  This post will describe the typical activities of a Documentum Health Check engagement as well as typical findings to give readers an idea of things to monitor in their own environments.

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FileNet Migration Findings

Published August 24, 2010 FileNet , OpenMigrate , Tech Tip Leave a Comment

I recently had the opportunity to work with a defense company who was looking to migrate data out of FileNet using our OpenMigrate solution. Compared to the other FileNet migrations we’ve done, at first this seemed much simpler, considering they only had 3 doc classes that they wanted to migrate, but pretty soon, we realized we had some challenges ahead of us.

Challenge One:  A Very, Very Old AIX Server

First we found that the FileNet server they were using was a very old AIX machine, and that the latest version of Java supported on that version of AIX was Java 1.1.  OpenMigrate (OM), on the other hand, had only been run on Java 1.4 and Java 1.5.  It would have been a stretch, but we could have tried updating OM to work with Java 1.3, but anything lower than that would probably not have worked since OM is built on the Spring framework.  What we decided to do instead was take OpenMigrate’s FileNet logic and execute the steps manually. Continue reading ‘FileNet Migration Findings’

Documentum r_object_id – Thoughts and Best Practices

Published August 23, 2010 Documentum , OpenMigrate , Upgrades 2 Comments

During our upgrade and migration work, we typically get asked the question “can OpenMigrate preserve the r_object_id during the upgrade process?”  Clients typically look for this because they are using the r_object_id as the “link” between Documentum and another system (PeopleSoft, SAP, Custom….).

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Documentum Migration to Alfresco – Summary of Series Postings

Published August 23, 2010 Alfresco , Document Control , Documentum , ECM Landscape , Migrations 1 Comment

While TSG will continue posting our experience on clients that are moving from Documentum to Alfresco, this will be our last posting for our series over the summer of 2010.  Summaries of the articles are presented below:

  • Documentum Migration to Alfresco – in our first post, we discussed the reasons why clients are choosing to move.  Detailed points included price, upgrade, software audit, open source, extranet, development environment, web content management and available tools.
  • Pricing – This post identified differences in the Documentum and Alfresco pricing model. 
  • User Interface Overview – This post compared interfaces from Documentum and Alfresco.
  • Development Environment – This post discussed the different development environments components including development framework, API Interface, Web Service Interface, Query Interface, Repository Configuration and Development Community.
  • Object Model – This post discussed underlying object model and differences between the two platforms.
  • Document Creation – This post discussed how documents are created and imported into either tool.
  • InputAccel – This post discussed how to use InputAccel with either Documentum or Alfresco.
  • Support – This post discussed support differences and approaches.
  • Document Control – This post went into detail on different components required for Document Control and how to leverage Alfresco.
  • Documentum Webpublisher and Alfresco – With the announcement that Web Publisher is going away, this post addressed how to leverage Alfresco for an Open Source alternative.

 If you liked the series or have other ideas for additional posts, please attach a comment.

How TSG survived…and thrived…through the economic downturn

Published August 18, 2010 TSG Leave a Comment

As we approach the two year mark of the economic downturn, we are proud to say that TSG has survived (and even profited) throughout the downturn. This post will share some of our thoughts as to how we survived as well as positioned us for growth in 2010.

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Documentum Support and Maintenance – Thoughts on continuing for WDK based applications

Published August 17, 2010 Documentum , Upgrades , Webtop 1 Comment

In this difficult economic environment, many clients are scrutinizing every bill to look for ways to reduce costs.  A client called me the other day in reviewing their current maintenance agreement with Documentum/EMC.  As with most clients, Documentum maintenance was 19% of the purchase price.  My clients rather leading question was:

“Given that Documentum has announced that they are not investing in WDK based solutions like Webtop and DCM, should I continue paying maintenance on these products as I know there will not be new functionality in the future?”

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Documentum WebPublisher and Alfresco WCM

Published August 16, 2010 Alfresco , Documentum 4 Comments

With Documentum announcing a relationship with Fatwire and that they will no longer invest in WDK (and WebPublisher solutions), many Documentum WebPublisher clients have looked at FatWire as well as Alfresco Web Publishing as an alternative to WebPublisher.  This post will compare WebPublisher to Alfresco to give users a deeper understanding of both tools.

Background

A web content management system (WCM) is a software system which provides website authoring and administration tools designed to allow users with little knowledge of web programming languages or markup languages to create and manage the site’s content with relative ease.

Most WCM platforms scan be split into two functional components – Content Production and the Content Delivery.  Content Production includes the generation, previewing, and approval of all content intended for deployment of a website or web application.  The Content Delivery component is limited to the mechanism that delivers the content from the core repository to its final destination, whether that is on a static website or a dynamic portal.  Both Web Publisher and Alfresco WCM accomplish these tasks, but there are some differences worth noting.  Let’s take a closer look at some of these features:

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Documentum, Document Control and Alfresco

Published August 13, 2010 Active Wizard , Alfresco , Document Control , Documentum , ECM Landscape , HPI , OpenOverlay 2 Comments

I was talking to a Life Sciences client that was looking to move away from Documentum for Document Control and they were asking the logical question “Why haven’t more companies moved to Alfresco and Open Source?”  For this post, I will try to address some of the reasons as well as present some background on how best practices for Document Control with Alfresco.  From an informal discussion with my peers here at TSG, some of the main reasons include: Continue reading ‘Documentum, Document Control and Alfresco’

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