On the "classic" Documentum products, the message is client unification with development moving firmly towards the Documentum Foundation Services (DFS) model and away from the WDK environment. CenterStage is becoming their main focal point of the web presence and as this does not have feature parity with WebTop or eRoom quite yet, the product management team emphasized that this was a journey as many customers have invested heavily in WDK based customizations. The mobile strategy is progressing with an iPad application promised by the end of the year. Work will also be done to unify the development tools surrounding the platform to make it easier to build Documentum based applications. The xCP platform still plays a large part of the strategy with a focus for partners to build industry specific business process solutions.
For collaboration users, eRoom will have another release towards the end of the year that will support the Microsoft Windows 2008 and SQL Server 2008 platforms, along with other technology certifications.
The messaging around the cloud was definitely the primary tagline, with all product families having some sort of cloud based access in their product roadmaps.
Bruce Bolton
(bruce.bolton@portfordsolutions.com)
For transaction document management users, EMC's ApplicationXtender(AX) platform is here to stay and supports a roadmap that included more workflow enhancements and again more focus is on the client tools and UI. A new connector application is planned that will more tightly integrate AX with the desktop and document access from business applications. Although the technology roadmap remains Microsoft based, the AX team have made a significant move towards web services with a feature rich services based toolkit. Also many of the new applications are based around the web services approach.
Integrations were also announced with Box.net (http://www.box.net/) for cloud based storage access and with Cisco's WebEx (http://www.webex.com/) online collaboration tool.
