EMC Documentum’s Architecture Overview

Kamel BELGACEM – S.C. Euroscript-Certitude S.R.L. January 2011

Bringing Order to Unstructured Business Information

Solution to structure business information– R&D Dept produces product specs and patents– Marketing Dept generates collateral and press releases– Customer Service Dept responds to queries– HR & Financial Depts manage internal resources and money– Employees, Business Partners need to share information across departmental

boundaries=> Secure Access, Easy Sharing and Workflowing Tasks is critical

Business Benefits of an ECM– ECM orders the flow and delivery of unstructured (and semi-structured)

business information, across an extended enterprise– ECM helps integration of all departments and groups in a company– ECM systems make sharing information with business partners easier

Bringing Order to Unstructured Business Information

Global & Distributed– Available content for multi-site companies– High-performance and data availability (caching, etc.)– Multilingual support for content and metadata

Extensible– Offers frameworks and API for custom-designed content objects– Service-Oriented Architecture to integrate with different EIS resources

Open– Standard-based ECM

SOAP, REST WebDAV, FTP, SMB, JDBC, LDAP JEE (compliant), .NET (supported) XML standards (wide range supported)

Bringing Order to Unstructured Business Information

Interactive– Wide range of available tools to interact

WebTop, DA, IDQL, IAPI, Composer, Integration Services, etc.

Scalable– High-traffic, large-scale, data exchange, caching, clustering, multi-

processing, etc.– Support of billions of objects– Support of 100’000 concurrent user benchmarks– Ingestion of 450’000 documents/hour

Secure– Enhanced ACLs, Permission Sets– Auditing, Tracing, Electronic Signatures– Content Encryption, Digital Shredding of Content Files

Documentum’s Architecture

The Foundation Group

Content objects– Documents, Folders, ACLs, Workflows, etc.– Each object is made of

Content Asset (source data): core information in its native format Content Attributes (metadata): descriptors (keywords, owner, version, links, etc.) Methods (operations): instructions performed on content assets (tranform, display,

etc.)

Content-types supported– Ordinary documents, Compound documents– Web pages– XML documents and components– Scanned images, Digital pictures– Multimedia digital assets (music, sounds, videos)– E-mails, IM messages– Collaborative content (discussions, chats, blog posts, wiki pages, etc.)– CAD drawings– Documents and data from ERP applications– Virtual reality environments

The Foundation Group

Object relations– Available system-defined relationships

Document Note (Annotations) Document Workflow/Lifecycles

– Supported custom-defined relationships Document Type A Document Type B (i.e: synchronization of information) Document (Main Language) Document (Translation)

The Foundation Group – Repository Infrastructure

The Foundation Group – Repository Infrastructure

File Store– Objects are stored within a file system– Objects are stored in their native format– Encryption could be performed, when needed (using TCS)

RDBMS– Holds metadata of objects– Holds links to objects' contents– May be a storage for content assets

XML Store– Ensures Native XML storage– Native XML querying at any detail level (tags, attrs, etc.)

The Foundation Group – Repository Infrastructure

Full-text indexes– For fast search through large collections of unstructured information– Specific to text-based content assets:

Documents (RTF, TEX, etc.) Text Files XML components HTML Movie subtitles etc.

The Foundation Group – Repository Services

Storage Infrastructure– Content Storage Services

Event-triggering Batch execution of storage allocation/migration policies Includes Audit events & migration logs for easy reporting

– Content Services for EMC Centera Bridges Documentum to EMC Centera (Content-Addressed Storage)

The Foundation Group – Repository Services

High-Volume Server– Helps for data-intensive, transactionally-oriented, CM applications– Enhances online & offline ingestion of content– Reduces meta-data footprint within the repository– Includes

Lightweight System Objects Data partitioning Batch processing

The Foundation Group – Repository Services

Data partitioning– Helps maintaining huge data in slices in a repository– Highly active content is placed into “hot” partitions (more freq. backup)– Less active content is placed into “cold” partitions (less freq. Backup)

=> Reduce time & cost of backup and maintenance

Batch processing– Speeds ingestion by combining operations that interact with the

database.– Instead of “transactioning” every object, objects are grouped into one

transaction

The Foundation Group – Repository Services

Lightweight System Objects– An LwSO is a composite object: composed of a parent object and series

of children (maintained by parent object)– LwSOs share common attributes and policies

The Foundation Group – Security Services

Security Services– Manage access to the underlying repository– Core Services

Authentication Authorization Auditing

– Additional Services Trusted Content Services Information Rights Management

The Foundation Group – Security Services

Authentication– Initially, Documentum relies on authentication mechanisms of

The underlying operating system The underlying database

=> Username/Password challenge

– Supports token-based authentication– Single Sign-On (RSA Access Manager)– Kerberos– Enterprise Identity Management

Microsoft Active Directory Sun ONE Directory Server Oracle Internet Directory IBM Tivoli Directory Server Novell eDirectory, etc.

The Foundation Group – Security Services

Authorization– Documentum relies mainly on ACLs (Permission Sets)– ACLs are automatically applied to every newly created object– ACLs could be changed

Manually: by users Automatically: by lifecycle changes, through business processes, by other

applications

– Basic Permissions None, Browse, Read, Relate, Version, Write, Delete

– Extended permissions Change Location, Change Permission, Change Owner, Execute Procedure,

Change State

The Foundation Group – Security Services

Auditing– Every operation performed by Documentum can be audited– Focus on “before” and “after” states for objects– Communications are also audited

Trusted Content Services– Encrypted file stores– Digital shredding of deleted items– Support for electronic signatures

The Foundation Group – Security Services

Information Rights Management Services– Secure “roving content” that requires persistent protection across

network

Documentum’s Architecture

The Application Services Group

Documentum includes a suite of business-oriented applications for managing content

Compliance Services– Retention Policy Services (RPS)

Immutation of objects (no change, no deletion, for audit, etc.) Adds Notification for retention, Auditing, Reporting

– Virtual Content Management (VCM) Enhances multi-repository mode though proxies to enterprise repositories

– Federated Records Services (FRS) Built-on VCM, configures importing, processing & management of enterprise

repositories connections to the main Documentum's docbase.

– Records Manager Corporate File Plans, Classification, File-level/field-level security

The Application Services Group

Core Content Services– Provide the fundamental capabilities for accessing & storing content– Library Services: Check-in/Check-out, Versioning, Basic renditioning– Workflow Services– Lifecycle services: Create, Modify, Review, Approve, Publish, Retire– XML Services

XML Applications (validation, chunking, transformation, XQuery, etc.)

– Federated Search Services (across 3rd-party sources)– Content Transformation Services (CTS): Docs, Videos, XML, Pics,

etc.– Content Intelligence Services (CIS): Taxonomy– Content Delivery Platform: Communications, XML DB Integration,

etc.

The Application Services Group

Process Services– Include capabilities for shared workspaces and business process

management across the enterprise– Collaborative Services

Collaborative object spaces (shared workspaces) Discussion threads (by topics) Contextual folders (by topics) Notes (web-based text files) Calendars Data tables (easy ways to collect information from forms, polls, etc.)

– Business Process Management (BPM)

Documentum’s Architecture

The Developer Resources & Tools Group

Helps developers to Design, Develop, Configure & Administer information-based applications

Design Capabilities– Enterprise Content Services (ECS): Support SOAP, REST and Java

services communications– Documentum Foundation Services (DFS): Provide SOAP and

RESTful services to interact with content server– Documentum Foundation Classes (DFC): Provide Java API for

interaction with content server– Business Object Frameworks (BOF): SBOs, TBOs & Aspects– Documentum Composer: IDE for customization

The Developer Resources & Tools Group

Configuration Capabilities– Presets

Assigned to items in DA/WebTop Specifies rules (lifecycles, actions, auto-complete text) in particular use

cases of DA/WebTop

– “HiFi” Forms Post data online: to a website, HTTP application Post data by e-mail

– Smart containers Provide templates for hierarchical objects (loan apps, health care records,..) Automatically establish relations between objects, data model, etc.

Administration Capabilities– Used to monitor, administer, configure and maintain content servers,

repositories and federations

Documentum's Architecture

The Experiences Group

Mainly manages end user's interactions through an extensible client infrastructure together with a set of activity-specific applications

Client Infrastructure– Web Development Kit framework– Application Connectors (to MS-Office, etc.)– Capabilities for RIA (JavaScript, Tibco, AJAX, Flex, etc.)

The Experiences Group

The Experiences Group

End-user Application Frameworks– Knowledge workers

Documentum Client for Outlook CenterStage for collaborative and changing business environments

– Interactive professionals Media WorkSpace (Leveraging Flex technologies with components) Web Publisher Page Builder (WYSIWYG for content on web-sites)

– Transactional TaskSpace (process, content, monitoring for transactional business

applications) Business Activity Monitor (graphical dashboard showing high-level view of

real-time process execution, ideal for managers and supervisors, includes dynamic KPI tracking capabilities)

Thank you very much!Vă mulţumesc !