The EMC® Documentum® platform provides the foundation on which developers can build applications and solutions for everything from managing business documents to publishing content across multilingual websites to enabling collaboration with interactive tools. This white paper details the architecture of EMC Documentum and identifies the four primary capability groups that form the foundation of ECM strategy. It also explains how Documentum fits into a service-oriented approach to content-based applications.
Recent EMC Documentum composition platform advancements are worth a mention in this section, as they represent a departure from the conventional approach of writing custom code. As businesses seek to reduce costs, complexity, and risk associated with developing applications, EMC Documentum enhances its platform offerings to address such challenges. Initially targeting case-based applications, the EMC Documentum xCelerated Composition Platform (xCP) allows organizations to build case-based applications and solutions. xCP is the new standard in application development as it combines integrated technologies, development and deployment tools, and best practices in a single platform that emphasizes configuration versus coding. xCP, however, is not the focus of this traditional architecture paper.
What EMC Documentum delivers
EMC Documentum orders the flow and delivery of unstructured and semi-structured business information across an extended enterprise.
Based on an extensible, open, and secure architecture, Documentum is in fact a set of integrated products and services that work together in varying combinations. From creation to capture, categorization, and electronic storage, through just-in-time delivery and archiving, Documentum supplies the core technologies that are critical for managing content within your organization:
• Global and distributed. For enterprises with sites and customers around the world, Documentum responds to users and content regardless of physical location. It includes unique caching capabilities for high-performance management to any location in the world. To accommodate local languages and currencies, the architecture stores multilingual content and metadata in shared repositories, forming a single, virtual repository that spans geographical boundaries and languages.
• Extensible. Extend Documentum to meet unique operational needs by embedding business rules or custom-designed content objects. Documentum incorporates a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that exploits the capabilities of enterprise content services for integrating with disparate enterprise applications. Add customizations in multiple areas, including user authentication, rich media handling, and legacy storage support.
• Open. Because Documentum is standards-based, it easily integrates with both existing IT infrastructures and evolving, web-centric environments. It exploits SOAP and REST as architectural approaches to web services. There are standard Documentum APIs for WebDAV, FTP, SMB, and JDBC. The architecture is fully JEE compliant (for web-based applications) and supports the Microsoft .NET environment. Documentum integrates readily with enterprise applications and systems, including directory services using the LDAP standard. It also supports a wide range of XML-based standards.
• Interactive. Documentum supports interactive applications by assembling content resources around communities of interest and particular business activities. It organizes content in an intelligent manner, and turns information about people, what they know, and what they do into valuable business resources.
• Scalable. With support for billions of objects, 100,000 concurrent user benchmarks, and ingestion speed of 450,000 documents per hour, Documentum is the proven leader in scalability. As your content management needs grow larger and more complex, the solution manages increasing content volumes, high-traffic loads, additional users, and more complex workflow processes. It also addresses the network latency and large-scale distribution issues that face global enterprises by utilizing its underlying multiprocessor systems as well as caching and clustering environments (vertical and horizontal scalability).
• Secure. As organizations make repository content available to a wider range of contributors, Documentum enforces secure access designations. Access control lists define the users, groups, and roles that can access the repository or the discrete objects that it contains, as well as the operations that can be performed. Sensitive information in the repository file stores are encryptable. It also keeps network communications among servers and desktop clients secure through the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). Documentum also supports electronic signatures and offers auditing of all system activities. Finally, Documentum secures roving content, those files and other objects that may be moving around the network and beyond purview of the repository.