EMC's Documentum product roadmap revealed

Documentum users have free collaboration tools to look forward to

Documentum, EMC’s Content Management and Archiving Division, unveiled its future product roadmap at its world customer and partner event, EMC World, held in Vegas.

Mark Lewis, EMC content management and archiving division president, discussed how the 2005 acquisition of Captiva and 2008 acquisition of Document Sciences had propelled EMC to the industry forefront of transactional content management. With Captiva providing input capabilities and Document Sciences the output functionalities, it means electronic data sources can be transformed into business content, which is then ready to be processed by enterprise applications, he said.

“In Q4, it will all be about the integration of transactional content management for out-of-the-box solutions through the integration of Captiva and Document Sciences,” said Lewis.

Lewis also announced “Project Athena”, which will also be released in the fourth quarter. “This will contain a great deal of SOA (service-oriented-architecture), and next generation capture technology,” he said.

Following Project Athena will be Project Janus, said Lewis. He remained slightly vague on the details of Janus but did say it would be the “next generation in email archiving”. He said, “emails will directly connect into the archiving environment.”

Lewis also provided more details on its forthcoming Documentum Archive. “This will give users the ability to do records management as a platform, as well as federated retention services to allow users to set life spans on documents that may not reside in Documentum,” he added.

For the knowledge worker, Lewis discussed the launch of new Web 2.0 software, which aims to increase collaboration inside the Documentum repository. The software is codenamed Magellen and the first beta, “the essentials client”, will be released in quarter three. Lewis said this will be free to existing Documentum customers.

Whitney Tidmarsh, vice president of strategic marketing for EMC software, added Magellen will contain blog and wiki support to allow users to share ideas, as well as social tagging to allow users to prioritise important information. There will also be mash-up and folksonomy capabilities, she said, using as an example, the combination of Magellen with Google Maps, which will allow users to see the whereabouts of colleagues.

Tidmarsh said, “Magellen will also contain a mobile application so you will be able to run it on your mobile phone and interact with colleagues and customers just as you would in the office.”

Magellen’s “enterprise client” will be released later than the essential client, in 2009 quarter one, she added.

EMC are also planning the launch of another Web 2.0 product called Media Workspace, which be released in quarter three. “This will allow people to collaborate in a Web 2.0 environment over images,” said Tidmarsh, who said it would be an ideal tool for marketing teams. Tidmarsh then showed the EMC World attendees how easy it was for users to rate images and leave their remarks on the image itself.