Documentum Archive Services for Sharepoint

I’ve been having some fun(?) this week installing and configuring Documentum Archive Services for SharePoint, let’s just say the documentation is far from ideal on this and it is also far from clear some of the rationale behind some of the problems we encountered. Anyway, some notes which may provide useful if you too try this installation:

Note: We were installing into a WSS installation which was configured through multiple users and with all users within a domain but which also had Microsoft Office Forms Server installed.

The following steps are required to install the Documentum Archive Services for SharePoint:
1. Create a SQL Server database as specified in the document Documentum Archive Services for Sharepoint 5.3 SP5.
2. Install Documentum Foundation Classes (DFC) and Primary Interop Assembler (PIA) on the WSS server. Note that once DFC is installed it creates an msi which should be used to install PIA.
3. Run the DCTM Archive Services.msi to install Archive Services. Ensure you have the server name and database for the database created in 1 as these will be used.
4. In order to configure the product to run using a domain user the following steps are also required. These are an amended list of steps taken from the document Documentum Archive Services for SharePoint Release Notes.
a. Grant the SharePoint Application Pool account full control permission on the DOCUMENTUM location.
b. Add a folder e.g. c:\dctm_tmp.
c. Grant the SharePoint Application Pool AND SharePoint MOFS Admin account full control to this folder.
d. Add the path to the [DMAPI_CONFIGURATION] section of the dcml.ini file in C:\Windows. Local_path = c:\dctm_tmp.
e. Grant the SharePoint Application Pool account full control to the Documentum hive in the registry.
f. Add the following to [DOCUMENTUM]\dfc.properties:
i. dfc.registry_mode=file
ii. dfc.registry_file=${dfc.user.dir}/Documentum.ini
g. Reset Internet Information Server, iisreset.
Note that Step 4 above removes the need to follow a solution on EMC Powerlink, ID esg44475, as this creates an alternative location for the dir.lck file.
Also note the reason for ensuring that the two users have access to c:\dctm_tmp, as defined in 4c, is due to the fact that the first time a Mapping is created everything works fine with just the Application Pool account having full account but future mappings require the MOFS Admin account to have access.

I’ll post some more next week on some of the experiences we have with the product and why people need to read Pie’s excellent post on the virtues of patience with SharePoint and Documentum.