Documentum – EMC World – Momentum 2012 – Early Predictions

Once again TSG is attending EMC World in Las Vegas – May 21-24.  For those interested, early discounts are still available at http://www.emcworld.com/momentum.htm.  While not much is known at this point in time about the final agenda list (or who the opening/closing acts are), this post will try to take a guess at the dominant themes based on the Momentum Conference Agenda.

From the initial agenda located at http://www.emcworld.com/MMTM12_Breakouts_v1.pdf, some thoughts.

• 100+ EMC Documentum, xCP, Captiva and Document Sciences sessions
• 20+ Customer and Partner sessions

Gone are the days when customers would dominate the bulk of the relevant presentations.  As Documentum has increased their product offerings, the number of customer presentations seem to have been squeezed out for the product managers.  This is similar to what we have heard about in the user group meetings as well.

Main Categories and number of initial presentations include:

• Application Transformation – 23
• Business Transformation – 11
• Fundamentals – 6
• Hands-On Lab – 11
• Information Transformation – 22
• New Developer – 7
• New User  – 15

The Application Transformation track is heavily focused on Document Sciences as well as some Case Management/xCP presentations.  Business Transformation is much more focused on industry roundtables, meetings and discussions that have been very interesting in the past.

New Users

Let’s look at the “New User” as the bulk of the overall conference themes tend to be very representative from this group.  Readers should understand that some of these are mentioned more than once in the example of “What’s Next with the EMC Documentum UI?”

• D2 – 6 out of 15
• Mobile – 6 out of 15
• xCP – 3 out of 15
• SharePoint – 2 out of 15

We are anticipating that the dominant theme/coming out party for Momentum will be introducing D2.  From our initial reviews, we don’t quite buy into D2 being a “next generation” approach.  In reading our review from last year, we really liked the Unified Web Client  vision from 2011 as a replacement for Webtop and don’t see D2 as a step toward that vision.  We see D2 as more of a “EMC bought something new to sell” rather than a next generation tool.  Our reviews have really seen it as a more configurable but not customizable Webtop replacement.  See Tony’s great comparison of the different tools along with screen cams at the links below:

http://blog.tsgrp.com/2012/02/20/documentum-searching-d2-webtop-hpi-and-xcp/

http://blog.tsgrp.com/2012/03/05/documentum-contributor-interfaces-d2-webtop-hpi-and-xcp/

Mobile would be the other theme that Documentum and others are pushing in 2012.  We are somewhat confused by the session titles (REST easy – Building Mobile Apps with EMC Documentum xCP?).   While we aren’t in the early adopter program for xCP 2.0, it should be interesting to see how TaskSpace (very WDK focused) can generate REST-based mobile clients and if anyone is successfully doing this.   Also, we expect Documentum to be highlighting their approach with the mobile client for Apple products that is not xCP.

What has changed?

As we mentioned in our recap from 2011 , the big push items for 2012 were to be:

• IIG has an ambitious plan around the Unified Web Interface, Cloud and Mobile clients.
• IIG announced partnerships with Box.net for an “extended enterprise” collaboration offering
• IIG announced partnership with Cisco for a collaboration approach with a social twist

Some thoughts:

• Unified Web Interface – this looks like it has been replaced with a combination of D2 as the interface along with the Unified Application Builder coming under the xCP product family.  The promise was for a new interface to replace Webtop AND CenterStage.  D2 doesn’t have the flexibility to accommodate the mobile and other components of a true SOA architecture (ActiveX so only Internet Explorer supported).  Also, D2 doesn’t address the collaboration component replacement for CenterStage.   It will be interesting to see how an xCP development environment accomplishes all of the above goals.
• Cloud – Lots of “cloud” sessions sprinkled throughout.  Documentum’s “on Demand” cloud solution continues to be interesting but more in the consistency with EMC World overall messages rather than practical client implementations.
• Mobile – xCP, iPad application and REST infrastructure were all part of the proposed solutions.   We are getting the feeling that most of this will be moving to xCP with a one-off for Apple products.
• Box.net – no mention in the agenda.  Similar to SAP alliance in 2010 we expect this was a one year and done alliance.
• Cisco – same presentation again this year.  Not expecting much here.  Demo was all vaporware last year.

What’s Missing

One key to understanding the theme is to understand what isn’t appearing in the agenda.  Some noticeable items not appearing include:

• Only 1 mention of Webtop
• No mention of CMIS
• No mention of CenterStage
• Only 2 mentions of D7

We would think that this would mean that D7 might be announced but not formally released.  From the roadmap narratives:

“Come learn the new D7 features in the industry-leading Documentum Platform including: streamlined and virtualized deployment support, system monitoring and reporting, scalability and performance improvements, security and enterprise readiness. “

Our thoughts would predict that the D7 release will not be as stack changing as D6 was for D5.3, but more in line with the D6.7 update from D6.6 – focused on infrastructure, compared to wholesale changes. Webtop, Centerstage and CMIS absences are consistent with our thoughts Documentum focus areas.  While still of interest to clients, none of these areas are a main focus for Documentum.

That’s our two cents.  Let us know your thoughts below: