• User experience and adoption
• Process design
• Creative production workflow
• Collaboration and program management
• Authoring tool integrations

1. The second pillar in the Interactive Content Management platform is creative process support. Creative users are not necessarily tech-savvy individuals so they need content management tools that are easy to use and don’t disrupt their demanding workday. Jumping back and forth between the tools they use to create the rich-media such as Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, and QuarkXPress is not practical. These users need to be able to save, view, and edit content stored in the Documentum repository much in the same way they would save to a local disk or a network file share.


2. Creative professionals often require collaboration capabilities, project tracking, and workflow that will allow assets to be routed around the organization for approval or renditions to be created automatically (such as transforming Word to PDF prior to sending the document for approval).

Workspace Collaboration

Item permissions Collaborate in context User configurable Alerts and Invitations Flexible hierarchy Respect retention policies Route items in workflow Lifecycle for files Metadata for items

1. Collaboration capabilities can be added to the Digital Asset Manager via Documentum Collaborative Services. This provides event scheduling, discussion threads, notes, and data tables to be created directly from within the DAM client. Customers can also choose to deploy EMC Documentum eRoom which has more comprehensive collaboration capabilities and is an easily adopted web-based collaborative workspace that enables distributed teams to work together more efficiently. With Documentum eRoom, project teams around the world can accelerate and improve the development and delivery of products and services, optimize collaborative business processes, improve innovation, and streamline decision-making.


2. Some of the collaboration features enabled by the Documentum platform include:

• User-defined dashboards: Obtain status of projects and processes that span multiple eRooms with direct access to underlying data.
• Integrated instant messaging (IM): Stay aware of team member availability, speed interactions, resolve issues, and send notifications via e-mail and IM.
• Project planning/reporting: Use Gantt charts and planning features to track tasks and milestones.
• Office/Outlook integration: Integrate Microsoft Office and Microsoft Outlook synchronization of tasks and events.
• Portal integration: Integrate with leading portal environments such as Microsoft SharePoint and BEA WebLogic.

Integration with Desktop Authoring

Creative tools: - Adobe Creative Suite (InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator) - QuarkXPress Office tools: - Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook) Authoring integration services - File share services

1. The key Documentum technology that helps connect the creative desktop with the repository is called Documentum File Share Services (or FSS). FSS allows users to save content directly to the repository from within certified applications and it provides application specific plugins for publishing layout tools such as Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress for advanced processing of these complex formats.


2. The Documentum Application Connectors can be used to integrate the Microsoft Office tools with the repository. They provided a dedicated “Documentum” menu within the office applications for search, metadata access, checkin/checkout, lifecycle management, etc.


3. Finally Documentum Authoring Integration Services provides FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning) access to the repository. These protocols are widely adopted and require no Documentum technology to be installed on the desktop. Most operating systems can understand and communicate with other systems using these industry standard protocols and Documentum provides a means to instantly connect to the repository to import and export content.

EMC Documentum File Share Services

A lightweight set of content management capabilities Access to the repository from your desktop (Windows Explorer or Macintosh Finder) and certified applications Miminal learning curve or training Cache for backup saves and performance Work-in-place link management Leverage strengths of the EMC Documentum platform

1. File Share Services (FSS) has been re-architected and improved dramatically in the most recent release of the product. FSS provides very familiar and easy-to-use access to the EMC Documentum repository and it’s been designed to increase end user adoption of content management throughout an enterprise. FSS is essentially an extension to the desktop that exposes a lightweight set of content management capabilities and it allows content to be opened and saved directly to the repository through a certified set of applications/authoring tools. FSS also provides link management for certified applications such as linking Microsoft Excel data directly from the repository into a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation.


2. FSS supports drag-and-drop access to the repository, double-clicking on content and launching it directly into the applications that created it (for certified applications), versioning, locking, caching and content commit capabilities (automatic, manual, or scheduled), and metadata access directly from a user’s desktop.


3. Some of the new features that have been added to the product include:

• Work-in-progress cache: This feature enables FSS to control both ends of the communication channel with improved reliability. The footprint on the end-users machine now includes a cache tuned for remote authoring. This cache provides local editing performance without network interruption or risk of data loss. Content is still controlled by the repository and none of the referenced content linked via FSS is affected.
• Two-phase commit: The authoring cache allows for two-phase commit in the FSS. Users can save local back-ups of content from their authoring application. By default, users need to explicitly store content in Documentum when its ready to be committed. This makes integration possible with any tool that understands the file system.
• Scheduled Commit: FSS 6.5 will be able to periodically scan for changed files that have not been uploaded into the repository. FSS will then either prompt the user for a commit decision or upload the content automatically depending on preference settings.
• Thumbnail server support: FSS can retrieve thumbnails directly from the Documentum Thumbnail Server, alleviating the need to download the entire file for OS-level processing.
• Support for distributed content: FSS now supports distributed content. FSS is location-aware and can use Branch Office Caching Services (BOCS) to access content from the closest cache.
• New UI and tighter OS integration: FSS now has a tighter integration with both Windows and Mac operating systems. The Connection Manager has been replaced in favor of quick connections from Mac Finder and Windows Explorer. Users are also able to quickly identify uncommitted content and have it stored into the repository.
• Reference deployments and benchmarks: Benchmarks obtained from a reference deployment are available to help tune new installations.
• Extension framework: The first release of a customization kit for FSS is in the 6.5 release. By following the guidelines in this SDK, it will be possible to replace FSS dialogs and add new custom action options to the context menu and system tray.
• Automatic Client Updates: FSS 6.5 clients are now able to detect the need to upgrade based upon server updates. This upgrade process can force all FSS clients to automatically update to the latest client release that has been made available on the internal servers without manual administration of each client upgrade.
• Drag-and-drop retention: Retention Policy Services 6.5 will be certified for use with FSS 6.5. This combination provides an easy to use, drag and drop solution for policy-based archiving and retention of every day documents.
• Macintosh OS 10.5 certification: Support for the latest Macintosh environment is provided in FSS 6.5

Creative Authoring Tools

1. FSS provides plug-ins for Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress for both PowerPC and Intel-based Macintoshs. These plug-ins provide a deeper integration with these commonly used page layout tools beyond the basic content management capabilities provided to the desktop including extracting images from the page layout and saving them as separate objects, grouping the page layout file and the images contained in the layout together in a virtual document structure, automatically creating a PDF rendition of each page of the layout, and automatically converting the links to the contained images to a path that can be resolved back to the repository via FSS.


2. In the case of Adobe InDesign CS3 on Mac OS X (as shown on the screen), users can simply save the layout file to the Documentum repository from the “Save As” dialog just as they would any other local or network disk. They user will also be presented with a dialog so they can see the structure of the layout, the images contained within the layout, control the version number created, determine if a PDF rendition of the layout should be produced and what quality that should be, and populate any metadata that is relevant to the assets. When the “Finish” button is pressed, the layout and images that were added to the layout that are not already in the Documentum repository are imported.

Office Tools

1. For customers and partners who need straightforward checkin/checkout and metadata capture functionality with no plug-in required in the applications themselves, FSS provides an infrastructure-based integration approach. FSS provides native application menu access (e.g. File->Save) to the repository allowing user processes to remain the same and requiring minimal change in how a user interacts with their favorite applications. FSS also provides strong work-in-place and link management capabilities which is very attractive in the Publishing vertical.


2. For users needing richer content management functionality, the Documentum Application Connectors expose powerful EMC-Documentum content services in targeted desktop applications. They require an additional client install on the desktop and they provide a new “Documentum” menu in each tool which users will have to interact with in order to access the functionality. In addition to core checkin/checkout and metadata management, the Application Connectors provide search and advanced Search, creating content from a Template, access to specific content versions, lifecycles, workflows, and WDK-based customization.

Operating System

1. FSS provides many content management features that go beyond a traditional file system so the user experience is not always identical to Windows Explorer and Macintosh Finder. In order to improve perceived performance to the end user, FSS makes use of a work-in-progress cache. Each time a user saves a file to FSS, it copies the file from the source location to the cache. This allows a user to quickly stage the file for upload to the repository without having to wait for it to be imported to the repository. Drag-and-drop of content to Windows Explorer and saving publishing layouts from within Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress are automatically committed to the repository. All other content saved to FSS from Macintosh Finder or from within any of the certified applications must be manually committed to the repository.


2. FSS provides flexibility to allow a user to manually “commit” the content to the repository at a convenient time either through the work-in-progress dialog (where all content that has not yet been committed to the repository can be viewed) or by right-clicking and selecting “Commit” from the menu for the given item. This feature is particularly important when dealing with large files where there may be many small updates to the content throughout the day on the local machine that a user may not want to send to the repository. Once the content has been committed to the repository, the item is automatically removed from the work-in-progress cache.


3. Another difference from working with plain network file shares is FSS prompts the user to apply metadata to the files committed to the repository. While these metadata dialogs can be turned off through configuration, the default is to present a dialog to the user to supply attributes for the files being uploaded so they can be classified and found at a later date. Finally, within Windows Explorer, FSS has file status indicators to inform the user whether or not the content has been uploaded to the repository or it is currently in the work-in-progress cache. This small red icon that appears near the file icon will be removed once the content is committed to the repository.


4. In the screenshots, we can see the Documentum File Share node within Windows Explorer and Macintosh Finder.