A few weeks ago I finished all of…
A few weeks ago I finished all of my basic trainings of McLaren Software: Business Fundamentals, Configuration and System Administration. Back in July I posted my first impression on Work Manager after my first hands-on experience. Now I’ve used it, customized and tweaked it. Time for another review.
Work Manager is a product that offers a lot of things out of the box. This is a very important aspect for decision takers in ECM. In theory this means less maintenance and upgrade costs, reducing the TCO. This is true but I believe in the fact that sometimes small tweaks in how things work can be a big added value for the product. A lot of customizations are of great benefit to the end users and after all, it’s the end user we need to please in a succesful project. Who’s using webtop completely out of the box without any configuration or customization? To be short, configuration and customization is important, and spoken out of experience, a lot of buy/no buy decisions are taken based on that fact as well.
So, how about Work Manager (Enterprise Engineer)? Work Manager is a fantastic product to tweak according to your needs. Roughly estimated, 95% of common adjustments can be done by configuration. During my test I also got the impression that the product is very mature which makes me feel confident about a coming project with Work Manager. I’ve seen EPFM into action but while EPFM is a set of services, integrated within webtop offered by EMC, Work Manager is a real product with a clear roadmap and a future. (EPFM is based on WDK)
Work Manager takes some time to start up but is in my opinion still reasonable for a large application with a rich user interface. Outlook or Word does not pop on your screen in less than a second either (At least not on my system). A small drawback for me is the fact that McLaren has put some business logic in its webservice layer. They had to, due to the fact that they also want to support FileNet with exactly the same set of features. Not a big issue and off course you can still use native Documentum as is together with Work Manager.
