Documentum

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Introduction

Documentum is an Enterprise Document Management System from EMC Software. Documentum offers the following functions:

• A secure content repository;
• Document locking;
• Workflow;
• Version management;
• Access management.

Document definition

Within Documentum, every document is assigned a document type. This determines both the information that can (or must) be specified for a document - the meta-data - and the actions that can be carried out for this document.

Documentum ships with a number of 'standard' document types, and it is possible to define any number of custom document types. Note that the document type here is not the same as a 'file type'. For example, Word, PowerPoint and HTML files can belong to the same document type.

For each document type, one or more lifecycles can be defined. A lifecycle defines the statuses that a document can go through from initial creation to final publishing. This may include Draft, Reviewed, Staging, Approved, Active, and so on. In addition to the lifecycles, it is necessary to define the workflows (see below) that can be used for each document type. A workflow effectively defines the route that a document can take through the lifecycle.

Document locking

Documentum provides full document locking by using check-out / check-in functionality. Before a user can change a document, they need to 'check out' the document. This locks the document (and a key symbol is shown next to the document name), and no other user can open the dame file for editing until the user who has checked it out has checked it back in again. This ensures that there are no 'parallel edits'. The Userid of the person who has checked out the document is saved as a document attribute, which means that if a user needs to edit a document that is currently locked, they can see which user is currently editing the document.

Note that when a user checks out a document, this takes a copy of the current version of the document and stores it in the user's local repository. Other users will still be able to display the 'current' version of the document, until the changed version is checked back in and released. A user can also cancel a check-out, which will delete the version in the user's local repository, and unlock the document.

Workflow

Documentum ships with a number of standard workflows, but allows additional client-defined workflows to be created. These can have any number of steps (each step representing an approval), and can be defined to be applicable to only certain types of documents, and/or available to only certain users.

A workflow task can be assigned to a reviewer group, in which case the task can be approved by any reviewer within that group (and the reviewer must 'acquire' the task before processing it), or can be assigned to an individual reviewer within a group. A task can also be assigned to multiple individuals (possibly within different reviewer groups). In this case, the task must be reviewed by all of the selected individuals, but only needs to be approved by at least one of the reviewers before the task can progress to the next workflow step. Note that if three reviewers are assigned and one approves the task but the other two reject it, the task will still progress to the next workflow step.

Assignment of a reviewer to a workflow task will result in an e-mail request being sent to the Documentum in-box of the reviewer. Documentum can be configured to send the same notification to other e-mail systems (such as Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook). The request contains a brief description of the task, and (where this has been sent to external e-mail systems) a hyperlink to the task in Documentum.

Recipients of a workflow task can choose to:

• Approve the workflow task, in which case it is forwarded to the next approver, or the documents released for publishing (as appropriate).
• Reject the workflow task, in which case it is returned to the person who initiated the workflow task - and not the person who approved the previous step (presumably because there could be multiple previous approvers, and Documentum wouldn't know which one to return the task to).
• Approve the workflow task, but pass it to another reviewer for an additional ('repeat') review. The workflow task stays at the same step within the overall workflow (that is, it does not 'progress' to the next step).
• Delegate the review to another reviewer. The originally-assigned reviewer (who is delegating the task) does not make a decision (either accept or reject) for the task.

Version management

Documentum provides full version management, by retaining the previous version of a document, every time a new version of the document is checked in. However, version management is at the document level - that is, Documentum simply knows that the document has changed - it does not know which parts of a document have changed, and does not provide an easy way of comparing versions of a file (for example, a side-by-side view as used in many Wikis). Finally, Documentum does not provide a 'reason for change' field at the version level, so there is no easy way to know why a document has changed.

The one plus-point of Documentum's version management is that it is easy to revert to a previous version of a file. All previous versions can be listed, and any one of these edited to become the new 'latest' version.

Additional information

Vendor website: software.emc.com