I’m going to try and get through the backlogs of write ups which I have, starting with this session which was hosted by Victor Spivak on the Tuesday morning. Firstly I must criticise the scheduling, or rather room scheduling. Victor’s sessions are notorious for their high attendance so why put this on in one of the smaller rooms, there was no spare space!
Victor talked about the themes which drive the architecture, namely:
– SOA
– Performance/Scalability
Victor did say at the start that some of the session would be a repeat of last year’s, fortunately I did not attend that but I have looked at some of the details which Victor talked about.
On SOA Victor talked about the need to remove the chattiness of DFC and the addition of numerous new services for D6.5. REST will be supported post 6.5, possible 6.6 release in 2010. XML and JSON representations will be made available. EMC will not try and take sides in the SOAP vs REST debate and will support both.
CMIS was discussed and Victor talked about the disappointment of JSR170 and that being the reason behind the lack of Documentum support for it. He talked about the goals of CMIS, all publicly available, and how CMIS can be considered the Esperanto of the ECM world. However he did say that the current release is best served by the Use Case of a repository explorer without too much complex functionality.
He then talked about the Centerstage model and revealed that xCP 2.0 will be based on this, more to come on this in another post. However that is not the only client approach they will follow, note Mediaspace is Flex based. He also raised the interesting idea of using Spaces in Centerstage to support multi-tenancy in the cloud, I’ll have to check some details on this but could be interesting.
On Performance and Scalability, when I stopped being annoyed at the guy who was on his phone!, Victor talked about High Volume Services and the concept of batching citing the example of creating 100 objects in the docbase and the number of api calls this generates. This can be vastly reduced with the concept of batching. Victor also talked about the concept of Lightweight SysObjects.
Next up was the subject of search. Now I had heard from a colleague about Documentum Search Services and Victor talked about it briefly, he did point out the sessions which would cover the details. DSS will use the same Index Agent as the current Search solution but will use xDB. (I had heard from another session that this may complicate the install, I’ll need to check the notes on this one). EMC will not force customers to move away from FAST and will support DSS and FAST running side by side for the forseeable future.
Victor also talked about the 100k user benchmark and the impressive results this showed, he compared this with MOSS 2010 which allegedly will have a limit of 30m objects per repository; for my current project this would not see us through to the Olympics in 2012!
Finally Victor talked a little on Virtual Content Management, which is the use of Federated Records and then briefly talked about Operation Customisation. This is to cover situations where BOF would not apply and the example Victor quoted is when a user wants to import a zip file and then on import for the contents to be extracted to a folder. Another example is a Recycle Bin. Interestingly Victor suggested they would be interested to hear of scenarios which customers/partners would like covered off and they would look at these.
Overall then a good session, a lot of info was already available but then this was a 6.5 architecture. Victor is a good presenter who is clearly passionate about his subject area. As an intro to more detailed sessions this worked well, if only I had the time to get to the other sessions!
Observing Content Management 