Documentum

Documentum is an enterprise content management platform currently developed by OpenText. Dell EMC acquired Documentum for $1.7 billion in the United States in December 2003. The Documentum platform was part of EMC's Enterprise Content Division (ECD) business unit, one of EMC's four operating divisions.

Documentum

Developer(s)	OpenText
Stable release	23.4 / December 2023
Type	Enterprise content management
License	Proprietary software
Website	www.opentext.com/products/documentum

On January 23, 2017, OpenText, a Canadian technology firm based in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada specializing in enterprise content management, acquired Documentum from Dell EMC for $1.62 billion.

History

Getting started

Howard Shao and John Newton founded Documentum in June 1990. They previously worked together at Ingres, a leading relational database vendor at the time, and sought to solve unstructured information management problems using relational database technologies. (Unstructured information refers to information that does not have a formal data structure – documents, images, audio, video, etc.) With initial backing from Xerox, Shah and Newton developed a customized system for Boeing to organize, store, maintain, and selectively publish the thousands of pages of information for the Boeing 777 training manuals. They developed another customized system for Syntex, a pharmaceutical vendor, to automate assembling New Drug Application (NDA) documents when seeking approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Documentum introduced its Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) in 1993, a client-server product for electronic document management. This product managed access to unstructured information stored within a shared repository, running on a central server. End users connected to the repository through PC, Macintosh, and Unix Motif desktop client applications.

Documentum EDMS provided check-in and check-out access controls workflow capabilities for sequencing document review and approval processes. It included a full-text search engine for retrieving documents from the repository. EDMS was adopted by several large enterprises, such as pharmaceuticals, oil and gas, financial services, and manufacturing companies.

Company growth

In 1993, Jeffrey Miller, a Silicon Valley marketing executive, joined Documentum as president and CEO with a mandate to transform the company from a technology-driven start-up into an established software firm. Under Miller's leadership, the company raised its first round of venture funding from Brentwood, Merrill Picker Anderson, Sequoia Capital, Norwest Corporation, and Xerox Venture.

Documentum was floated on NASDAQ on February 5, 1996, listing with the DCTM symbol.

Web versions

In 1998, Documentum launched its Web Application Environment, a set of Internet extensions for EDMS, offering Web access to the documents stored within an EDMS repository.

In 2000, Documentum released Documentum 4i, its first Web-native platform. The company redesigned the repository to ensure that it could manage a huge number of discrete objects—ranging from self-contained documents to granular information snippets. Beyond just managing documents for print or electronic distribution, Documentum 4i could integrate with external Web applications and be used to distribute content to portals, web application servers, and websites.

Several third-party applications such as LaseFiche, DocuWare, and DropBox are based on Documentum.

Content management platform

In 2002, Documentum launched Documentum 5 as a unified enterprise content management (ECM) platform for storing a virtually unlimited range of content types within a shared repository. The platform provided integrated business process management (BPM) capabilities as well as tools for managing content across a distributed organization.

Key acquisitions

The company made many acquisitions over several years, adding additional capabilities.

• Bulldog, announced in December 2001, added extensive digital asset management capabilities to the repository for the management of digitized multimedia content.
• Boxcar, announced in January 2002, added technologies for syndicating content to remote repositories.
• eRoom, announced in October 2002, provided a collaborative workspace for distributed business teams, including those from disparate organizations, to share content over the Internet.
• TrueArc, also announced in October 2002, added record management capabilities and augmented Documentum's offerings for compliance solutions.
• askOnce, announced in March 2004, provided enterprise content integration and federated search technologies for accessing and retrieving information stored in disparate repositories.
• Acartus, announced in October 2005, provided capabilities for archiving business reports, billing statements, insurance policies, and other fixed content.
• Captiva Software, also announced in October 2005, added image capture and scanning capabilities to convert paper-based documents into digital formats.
• Authentica, announced in March 2006, added digital rights management features, to secure digital assets outside the boundaries of the shared repository.
• ProActivity, announced in June 2006, added business process analysis and business activity monitoring features to improve the business process management capabilities of Documentum.
• X-Hive, announced in July 2007, added XML database capabilities for managing and repurposing XML-tagged content components within an enterprise environment.
• Pericent, announced in December 2017, added Document Management Software.
• C6, announced in November 2011, EMC signed an exclusive licensing agreement with C6 to deliver the D2 web client.

Products

Documentum Server (formerly known as Documentum Content Server)

Documentum Server is the core platform, which manages content in a repository consisting of three parts: a content server, a relational database, and a place to store files.

Items in the repository are stored as objects. The file associated with an object is usually stored in a file system, and the object's associated metadata (file name, storage location, creation date, etc.) are stored as a record in a relational database.

Documentum Clients

Documentum Smart View

Formerly known as D2, Smart View is the primary client for Documentum. Smart View is a configurable, content-centric client that provides access to ECM applications.

Other clients

• Documentum xCP: a development platform for automating business processes. The platform consists of a web-based client and a platform for user interface development and server-side components.
• Webtop: a browser-based interface that provides access to the repository and content management services.
• My Documentum (deprecated) provided content management services and information access within the infrastructure.

Releases

Version	Date
5.3	April 2005
6	July 2007
6.5	July 2008
6.7	April 2011
7.0	November 2012
7.1	2013
7.2	January 2015
7.3	November 2016
16.4	February 2018
20.4	November 2020
21.2	April 2021
21.4	November 2021
22.2	June 2022
23.2	May 2023
23.4	December 2023

API

Documentum functionality is made available through application programming interfaces (API) including web services, WebDAV, FTP, Java, Documentum Foundation Classes, Documentum Query Language (DQL), Web Development Kit API (WDK), SMB/CIFS and CMIS.

Most of the customization in the basic product is done using the DFC (Documentum Foundation Classes), a comprehensive but rather dated (as of 2015) collection of Java APIs. Customization can be done via configuration, particularly through the extension products D2 and xCP. These additions aim to provide faster ways of building applications based on document types and metadata, and business processes, respectively.

Functions

Documentum provides management capabilities for all types of content. The core of Documentum is a repository in which the content is stored securely under compliance rules and a unified environment, although the content may reside on multiple servers and physical storage devices within a networked environment.

Documentum provides services such as document management, collaboration, search, content classification, input management, Business Process Management (BPM), customer communication management, and Web content management.