Documentum Positions in Content Management Arena

Software Magazine, Feb, 2001 by Elizabeth U. Harding

COMPANIES ARE QUICKLY FINDING OUT that managing Web content manually is a bear. Dealing with the ever-increasing volumes associated with dynamic content has become a growing crisis, so it's no surprise that IT is looking to automate content management.

Analysts predict substantial growth in the content management market. Forrester Research Inc., Cambridge, Mass., estimates that the content management market will grow to $10 billion by 2004. According to META Group, Stamford, Conn., 95% of the Global 2000 will have deployed an XML-enabled content management system by the year 2003.

"We're seeing more and more that content management is becoming a standard line item for budgeting around e-business initiatives," says Whitney Tidmarsh, vice president of product marketing at Documentum Inc., Pleasanton, Calif. "A company with any kind of global Web presence can have half a million Web pages today and, considering the volume of content that's being utilized for c-business activities, you really need a system to help you automate the production process of that content."

Documentum is transitioning from its roots in integrated document management (IDM) into Web content management applications designed to manage the enterprise's intranet and extranet content. "We used to focus on enterprise documents that ran an organization," says Tidmarsh, "but we saw that our customers needed to publish a lot of that same enterprise content out to other audiences via the Web."

Making the Move

The company's first move into the content management arena was the release of Documentum 4i, a platform for building end-to-end content management solutions. Last April, the company released Documentum 4i eBusiness Edition, an enterprise-scale XML content management system addressing content creation and management, Web site management, content delivery, and deployment.

Built on an n-tier architecture, Documentum 4i eBusiness Edition consists of the eContent Server, a Web server, the RightSite server applications, a relational database, and the client interface. The eContent Server captures documents, workfloxv objects, Web pages, and other different forms of content and stores them as objects in a repository, which sits as a layer on top of the relational database.

In a statement, David Truog, Forrester research director, says that traditional Web content vendors are in for some tough competition from document management vendors. "This market is just warming up, and our research shows that the winners will be products that are easy to use and offer both strong workflow and version control," Truog says.

Documentum built its Web content management solution on its proven, technical architecture. According to Tidmarsh, Documentum is currendy the only Web content management vendor that has an enterprise piece, managing enterprise plus Web content. Moreover, Documentum 4i eBusiness Edition has integrated workflow or business process automation.

"We have an open-standards-based approach to our architecture," says Tidmarsh. "That lets us easily partner with leading vendors beyond the content management piece needed for e-business application deployment. We partner with application server vendors and vendors on the personalization-, authoring-, and commerce-platform side, and we also integrate with back-end systems."

This lets companies using Documentum 4i Business Edition use their preferred authoring tools and desktop applications, and exchange content with ERP, CRM, and other enterprise applications.

Managing XML Fragments

Documentum is a founding member of XML.org. "XML is now pretty much the content standard," says Tidmarsh. "It's the number one choice for companies doing online activity because it allows for content reuse. We've put XML to use exhaustively throughout our entire system, in our own ability to integrate with other applications. We use XML as the means to interchange content as well as validate schemas and store fragments.

Since XML generates a lot of fragments, what best manages them? Database management systems or content management systems?

"I believe content management systems can best manage these individual fragments of XML," says Tidmarsh. "We use an underlying relational database for storage, but you want to wrap XML fragments, just like you do any other form of content, with the right business processes, business rules, and version management--and that all comes with a content management system."