News of EMC's big Documentum 6 release is rolling out bit by bit. Today's announcement focuses on ease and speed of deployment, with highlights on services-oriented architecture (SOA), development, configuration and caching upgrades aimed at IT departments. The big-picture explanation is that enterprise content management (ECM) products like Documentum are fast becoming corporate standards (along with IBM/FileNet, Oracle/Stellent, OpenText, and, some would admit, Microsoft SharePoint), so IT folks want a faster, easier way to build, test and deploy applications throughout the enterprise. On the SOA front, the platform's API has been overhauled to simplify and streamline services-oriented development. "Before, we took our API and just added Web service wrappers," admits Karin Ondricek, a senior marketing manager. "This is complete rearchitecture of the API to be much more efficient and easier to use." As an example, Ondricek says importing a directory into the system used to involve a multi-step process, but those steps have been aggregated in the Documentum 6 API into simple "create object" service. EMC also has replaced proprietary terminology with developer-friendly labels describing exactly what the services do.
