EMC eases Documentum desktop integration

EMC is having a big conference in Europe [1] this week in Athens, Greece where they announced EMC My Documentum, a set of tools designed to help employees use Documentum tools without having to access the Documentum client. These tools have been incorporated into the software that employees are most likely using inside large organizations such as Microsoft Office and Outlook.

By more tightly integrating the Documentum functionality inside these tools, it should be easier for non-technical end users to access and take advantage of key Documentum functionality (such as properties and version history) without having to see the entire spectrum of Documentum functionality available in the web client.

Whitney Tidmarsh, CMO for the Content and Archiving Division at EMC, said that this should make it easier to use Documentum functionality without training. "The EMC My Documentum family blends the convenience and familiarity of desktop applications with the power of Documentum ECM," Tidmarsh said. "Knowledge workers can work in ways that best suit their needs--whether online or offline--with no training required."

IDC analyst Melissa Webster added that employees are much more likely to use CMS functionality when it's integrated inside applications in this fashion. "One of the reasons why many enterprise content management initiatives fail is that ECM functionality is not well integrated into the business applications that knowledge workers use every day," Webster said.

(These screenshots illustrate how EMC has integrated Documentum functionality directly into Outlook and Sharepoint.)

When you ask most users to take an extra step to open a separate client, it increases the likelihood they won't use that tool. By integrating the most important functionality directly into the tools that employees are already using, it makes it much easier for users accessing CMS functionality to add documents to the repository and get information about documents that are already in it. Power users can still open the Documentum client if they wish, but for many employees, this increased integration is all they will need.

For more information:
- see the EMC press release [2]

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New EMC Solutions Extend Customer Value of Microsoft SharePoint Server [4]
EMC: Rapid app development and cloud computing key to future of CM [5]
One on One with Len Devanna of EMC [6]