EMC introduces My Documentum

Some former colleagues from the Open University attended the 'Momentum Europe' conference in Athens last week. I had already spotted this press release but have only now got round to examining the release of the new 'My Documentum' family:

"EMC My Documentum Family Delivers The Power of Enterprise Content Management to Every Business User"

The press release has embedded YouTube videos and links to product information pages.

So, my initial thought was, nothing new here, it's just repackaging existing products under a new marketing banner, but its Documentum Client for Outlook (DCO), File Sharing Services etc

Not so ! Discussing this with my old colleague Mark, who was at the conference and very much knee and elbow deep in the Open University Documentum implementation, he said there is considerable new code, and for example with DCO the integration is much slicker, giving a much more 'native' Outlook experience.

This is interesting in the historical context of a blog based discussion with Shiv Singh of RazorFish about "Outlook as the portal" - its your email client, your personal information manager, your contacts manager, calendar, RSS reader etc etc ...... but also your client for your Documentum ECM repository (and other enteprise systems too ?)

To take that topic down a slightly different path, at an AIIM sponsored seminar on SharePoint 2010 this morning, one screenshot showed Outlook 2010 displaying social information gathered from SharePoint MySite profiles.

Yet, unless I am missing something, or doing something really stupid, with Outlook 2007 and SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) you can not simply drag and drop an email from your inbox into a SharePoint document library. Sure you can connect to a document library, it appears in your left hand navigation pane, and will allow you sync the contents of that document library to take them "off line" and on the road with you - but can't just simply move an email into the library ! Nor can you create a 'shortcut' in the Outlook shortcuts view of the left hand nav bar, to a WebDav (Network Places) view of a document library either.

Hurrah (!) to EMC for continuing the client side development, and lets home SharePoint integration with Outlook and particularly email is better in the next version.

SharePoint 2010 'sneak peak'

OK, well thanks to MSFT for making this available:

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/Pages/Overview-Video.aspx

And I know its 'as advertised', but I guess I was just hoping for some really interesting information management snippet to leap out at me - but nope, nothing there.

The videos are good, and they concentrate on what can be shown right now:

• Aysnchronous UI
• The ribbon interface (yuck by the way.....)
• Sliverlight web part
• Beefed up BDC
• Developer tools
• Ability to restore a non-production database (?)

Well there is more than that, for example the super feature which allows you to import a 'style' from a PowerPoint deck and brand your SharePoint site with it, ooooh, thats useful.....

I was hoping that they may have fixed the products biggest architectural issue - putting content items into SQL Server as blobs, maybe they have made the file system connector an out of the box feature ??? We will have to wait and see.

Oh yes, and of course, lets not forget that Groove now seems to be the 'thick client' for SharePoint, including a name changeto SharePoint Workspace to reinforce the point.

At one point in the overview video the presenter mentions 'craddle to grave' information lifecycle management - but that was it, not details on how that was going to work, or what features would help to facilitate it.

However, like I said, there were very upfront about this merely being the 'sneak peek' to wet our appetites, and of course to get you to sign up for the SharePoint conference in Vegas in the fall, when the public beta will be unvailed, but for now to qoute the anonymous cop in BladeRunner "nothing to see here, move along now........."

p.s. the really funny part, I could not get the videos to play in my corporate locked down instance of Internet Explorer and had to watch them on the Mac when I got home last night (after installing a Sliverlight player, of course......)