A very brief note: I have worked with Documentum on-and-off since about 1998, so when I started we used v3, including a desktop client that had its own window and everything.
This started as a part-time commitment but I gradually became more involved, and spent about 5 years as a full-time Documentum administrator, and the main technical authority on the product within our company. I thought I’d left it behind in 2005, but now I seem to be getting involved with it once more as a consultant & contractor.
My interest/expertise has always been in the administration of Dctm, rather than programming it – creating customisations and Dctm-based apps is another skillset in itself. I make sure that servers are running, backups are effective, and I can dive into the object model through DQL and the API to make those low-level adjustments.
As a general comment on the product, when I first came across it I was impressed by the core server – it has a simplicity of conception but great power that allows you to do almost anything. The flipside is of course that more high-level features need a lot of additional implementation on top of the core, whether this is for a new Dctm feature, a separate product, or a local customisation. I did for a while (perhaps late in the v4 period, and early in v5) feel that the product was losing its way a little – a lot of acquisitions being hurriedly integrated, and some new features (XML) seeming rather “bolted-on” to existing functionality. But the story does seem to be more coherent these days … or perhaps just slightly less breathless. Let’s see what v6 brings…
It has never really satisfied me as a simple groupware type solution – just sharing docs between team members where you don’t need total version tracking & security solutions – it can seem slow, and the end-user clients have had a series of “misses”, starting with DTC 4. It may be that the integrations with eRoom and SharePoint (neither of which I’ve checked out) improve the offer in this area, and I’m told that Webtop is actually becoming bearable in v6.
I don’t want to seem too rude – as an admin, Dctm gives me a level of control that some other products make very hard; the feature set is now very wide and flexible; and for sheer industrial storage of documents with security & reliability, it gives you a good deal of confidence.
Finally, please note that Documentum belongs these days to EMC, I’m sure it’s © and ® and ™ etc etc, and I make no representations on these pages to definitive knowledge about anything. I’m just telling it as I find it…