Momentum Berlin 2011

Momentum Berlin 2011 has ended. It was a great, well organised event. The only point of critic I can give is to create more opportunities to engange in networking with other people. Don’t get me wrong, the parties (ewerk and 40 seconds) were great but the music was a little bit too loud to have a good conversation. Nonetheless, we did have a lot of fun!

So what did we learn this year? Apart from the C6 acquisition, no real surprises. Here’s a small summary of what was new for me.

xMS

xMS is new deployment model. The idea is to create a blueprint of your Documentum project and to deploy this blueprint to a VMWare environment without the need of someone installing and configuring everything manually. For larger projects this could mean that you can reduce the time to deploy from days or weeks to just a few hours.

Realtime predictive intelligence

We saw two great examples of how EMC wants to become more intelligent in its content delivery, improving user experience a lot. BOCS is great when having branch offices but content would only get cached if it was accessed first.  The plan is to predict what kind of content users in a certain branch office access a lot and pre-cache similar data. On top of that BOCS will also allow async writes, allowing you to write to BOCS first, who will then asynchronously write content to the content server. You all probably know Amazon’s feature “People who bought this book also bought …”. xPlore will be able to do something similar (We saw a demo in centerstage).

xPlore

There is more to say about xPlore. There will be query based subscriptions, thesaurus support and EMC continues to improve performance as well.

The unified client

EMC announced the acquisition of C6 technology. Are we happy with that? I heard a lot of positive reactions but EMC really has to sort some things out as not everything I heard was positive … Personally I have mixed feelings. For me, D2 is webtop, and X3 is centerstage, based on a common configuration layer.  The common configuration layer is a good thing but you have to be very careful with that. It sits on top of DFC or DFS which means that from an architectural point of view you absolutely cannot implement business logic in that configuration layer or you’re in trouble with other applications. If you do that, you lose all the power of TBO. We know C6 for quite a few years now in Belgium and D2 is not new to me. It’s not a major success here because of what I mentioned earlier, it really just looks like webtop and in terms of customization you’ll hit a wall much more quicker than you will with WDK.

Press release acquisition C6 technology

D7

Documentum 7 is announced for Q3 2012. No major surprises here. In D7 there will be a major performance increasement regarding to creating sessions and session management. EMC’s focus is changing to Restful services and will fully support all services as Restful. DFS will become the primary interface instead of DFC. D7 will also come with extensive monitoring options, something a lot of people will applaud. I’m also looking forward to the content server “Dormant state” which actually sets the content server to read only, ideal for patch upgrades without downtime for consumers.

Conclusion

For the first time since long I have a good feeling about Documentum long term and Jeroen Van Rotterdam plays a big role in that. He has a clear vision and there is a lot of innovation going on. On the short term there is still a lot of confusion about EMC’s UI strategy.

See you next year in Vienna!

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