EMC launches documentum ECM 6.5

On Tuesday, EMC officially released Documentum ECM 6.5 [1]. The upgrade boasts a rich Flex graphical interface along with Web 2.0 collaboration tools, which provide what Whitney Tidmarsh, EMC's VP of Marketing, Content Management and Archiving, describes as "Web 2.0 without the risk." They also introduced  a new product called 'Center Stage [2],' which will be available for free to EMC customers and will act as a graphical front-end to the document repository. Among its highlights is the Image Carousel, [3] a view of your documents you can flip through--in a similar fashion to iTunes cover-flow view--to quickly to locate the document you want. In addition, EMC released a new High Volume Server [4] for batch processing high-volume transactions, such as email archiving.

While IT should be pleased to introduce Web 2.0 functions in the enterprise with some back-end control, it remains to be seen whether end users will embrace this, or continue to want to use their familiar tools on the open web. Wade Roush on Xconomy Boston [5] points out the irony of trying to take the free and open collaboration of Web 2.0 and apply it to a controlled enterprise environment, but he adds that you could also see it as encouraging that businesses are finally understanding how people are utilizing these tools to do their jobs. Regardless, users should be happy to have a more pleasant visual experience when working with the software to interact with one another and access documents.

For more:
- hear [6] what Whitney Tidmarsh has to say
- read Wade Roush's take [5]