Documentum

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Documentum is an enterprise content management platform, now delivered by EMC Corporation, as well as the name of the software company that originally developed the technology. EMC acquired Documentum for $1.7 billion in December, 2003. The Documentum platform is part of EMC's content management and archiving business unit, one of EMC's four operating divisions.

Contents

[edit] History

[edit] Getting started

Howard Shao and John Newton founded Documentum in June 1990. They had worked together at Ingres, one of the leading relational database vendors at the time, and sought to solve unstructured information management problems using relational database technologies. (Unstructured information refers to information that does not have a formal data structure – documents, images, audio, video, etc.) With initial backing from Xerox, they developed a customized system for Boeing to organize, store, maintain, and selectively publish the thousands of pages of information for the Boeing 777 training manuals. They developed another customized system for Syntex, a pharmaceutical vendor, to automate the process of assembling New Drug Application (NDA) documents when seeking approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Documentum introduced its Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) in 1993, a client-server product for electronic document management. This product managed access to unstructured information stored within a shared repository, running on a central server. End users connected to the repository through PC, Macintosh, and Unix Motif desktop client applications.

Documentum EDMS provided check-in/check-out access controls as well as workflow capabilities for sequencing document review and approval processes. It included an integrated full-text search engine for retrieving documents from the repository. Because of its applicability for organizations that produced, distributed, and updated complex sets of electronic documents in a systematic fashion, EDMS was adopted by several large enterprises—particularly in industries such as pharmaceutical, oil and gas, financial services, and aerospace manufacturing.

[edit] Becoming an enterprise software firm

In 1993, Jeffrey Miller, an experienced Silicon Valley marketing executive, joined Documentum as president and CEO with a mandate to transform the company from a technology-driven startup into an enterprise software firm. Under Miller's leadership, the company raised its first round of venture funding from Brentwood, Merrill Picker Anderson, Sequoia Capital[1], Norwest, and Xerox Venture.

Documentum applied Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm” strategy to successfully address the document management marketplace. The company focused on solving customers' problems, targeting one industry at a time. It steadily developed a portfolio of software solutions that attracted mainstream companies and government agencies, seeking to transform their publishing operations.

Documentum became a public company on February 5, 1996, listing on NASDAQ with symbol of DCTM.

[edit] Moving to the web

In 1998, Documentum launched its Web Application Environment, a set of Internet extensions for EDMS. This product provided access through a Web browser to the business documents stored within an EDMS repository.

In 2000, Documentum released Documentum 4i, its first native Web application platform. The company redesigned the repository to ensure that it could manage a very large number of discrete objects -- ranging from self-contained documents to granular information snippets. Beyond just managing documents for print or electronic distribution, Documentum 4i could integrate with external Web applications and be used to distribute content to portals, Web application servers, and Web sites.

[edit] A unified platform for enterprise content management

In 2002, Documentum launched Documentum 5 as a unified enterprise content management (ECM) platform for storing a virtually unlimited range of content types within a shared repository. The platform delivered integrated business process management (BPM) capabilities as well as tools for managing content across a distributed organization.

Through a series of acquisitions over the next several years, the company added further capabilities, including records management, digital asset management, Enterprise Content Integration, imaging, and collaboration. Key acquisitions that have accelerated internal development efforts include:

  • Bulldog, announced in December 2001, added extensive digital asset management capabilities to the repository for ingesting, managing, transforming, and distributing a wide variety of digitized multimedia content.
  • Boxcar, announced in January 2002, added technologies for syndicating content to remote repositories.
  • eRoom, announced in October 2002, provide a collaborative workspace for distributed business teams, including those from disparate organizations, to share content over the Internet.
  • TrueArc, also announced in October 2002, added records management capabilities and augmented Documentum's offerings for compliance solutions.
  • askOnce, announced in March 2004, provided enterprise content integration and federated search technologies for accessing and retrieving information stored in disparate repositories.
  • Acartus, announced in October 2005, provided capabilities for archiving business reports, billing statements, insurance policies, and other kinds of fixed content.
  • Captiva, also announced in October 2005, added image capture and scanning technologies to convert paper-based documents into digital formats.
  • Authentica, announced in March 2006, added digital rights management technologies, to secure digital assets outside the boundaries of the shared repository.
  • ProActivity, announced in June 2006, added business process analysis and business activity monitoring features to enhance the BPM capabilities of Documentum.
  • X-Hive, announced in July 2007, is expected to enhance the Documentum's capabilities for managing and repurposing XML-tagged content components within an enterprise environment.

The culmination of these acquisitions was Documentum 5.3, released in April 2005, followed by Documentum 6, launched in July 2007. Documentum 6.5 was released in July 2008.

[edit] The infrastructure for content applications

Documentum provides management capabilities for all types of content including business documents, photos, video, medical images, e-mail, Web pages, fixed content, XML-tagged documents, etc. The core of Documentum is a repository in which the content is stored securely under compliance rules. This repository appears as a unified environment, although content may reside on multiple servers and physical storage devices within a distributed environment.

Documentum functionality is available through a variety of user interfaces and through application programming interfaces (API) including web services, WebDAV, FTP, and file share services. End users and applications can access content in any stage of its lifecycle – during creation, review, approval, published stage, or retirement.

Documentum provides a suite of services which include document management, collaboration, search, content classification, input management, business process management (BPM), customer communication management, Web content management, digital asset management, forms processing, information rights management, compliance, computer output to laser disc (COLD) and archiving.

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^ "Sequoia Capital funds Documentum". http://www.sequoiacap.com/company/documentum/. 
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