EMC eRoom is going away.  It has been marked as End of Life (EOL) so what next?  EMC Documentum have 2 options: EMC Documentum Collaboration Services; EMC Documentum Centerstage.  Armedia’s immediate goal is to support Collaboration Services, then Centerstage but why stop there?  Why limit a client’s choice.

Armedia’s eRoom migration story is in 3 acts (and yes, I have been listening to some test pieces that I used to play in my brass banding days – check out Year of the Dragon by Philip Sparke).

Act I – The Export

Getting the content out of eRoom into an understandable format.  Of course, its not just the content, there is  a large quantity of metadata in eRoom as well.  Act I – The Export deals solely with interrogating eRoom and generating a document detailing everything about eRoom.  From communities to Files.  From eRoom Setup to databases – we mean everything.  The result: a well-formed XML document

Act II – The Transformation

As with any classic performance, after the captivating opening, Act II deals with getting to know the characters.  In this case, the transformation gets to know the XML document and gains a deep understanding of the objects held within.  The transformation is responsible for also generating a secondary XML document. This is formed to support the ingestion to a new Content Management System (CMS) and / or Collaboration System.  Currently the supported transformation is for EMC Documentum Collaboration Services.  This can easily be extended due to the flexible architecture of this utility and is simply a case of transforming XML.

Act III – The Load

The closing act is the build up to the dramatic climax which leaves the audience going “WOW!”.  eRoom Migration aims to achieve the same “WOW!”.  Now that the XML has been transformed you can sit back and let the load run automatically.  That’s it.  By using the ingestion engine of Caliente! loading all the content and metadata is simple.  Just let eRoom Migration take care of everything for you.  The only thing it does not do is say “WOW!” – we leave that to you.

Over the next few weeks I plan to talk in more detail about the approach taken and dig deeper into the 3 different pieces of the migration effort.  For those eRoom users, what do you see yourselves using in the near future?

Migrating CAD engineering drawings poses its own set of unique challenges. AutoCAD and MicroStation drawings can internally have references to other drawing files that exist within the content management system (or file system). When moving these files over to a new system, care must be taken to ensure these references are maintained.

Sword CADtop is a tool that provides users access to CAD drawings that are stored in a Documentum repository directly from within AutoCAD or MicroStation. It gives the user the ability to check in/out drawings, browse, search, view documents and attach reference drawings that exist in the docbase. CADtop maintains reference information by updating the links within the drawing and storing this information in a registered table.

CADtop also provides an import tool that can be used to migrate documents into the Documentum system. It handles importing of documents of multiple types, such as .pdfs, .docs, .tifs, etc. along with the drawing formats, .dwg and .dgn. It is a very simple to use command line tool, but it has its limitations. It can only handle importing up to around 5000 files at a time. However, this can be overcome by creating a batch script to automate the copying of sets of files to a temporary directory and running the import tool.

The import tool uses an XML configuration file to determine the object type, folder path to import from and cabinet/folder to import to. However, those are the only properties you can set. The import tool has no way to attach meta-data from a database to content files being imported. A way around this is to make sure each file has a unique name, then import the files, then using a DFC script, update the properties of all the objects in the docbase from an XML file (for example). This works well as long as all the filenames are unique in the first place, or not drawings with references. If filenames are not unique, then you would have to rename the files, which means the filenames will no longer match the drawing’s internal reference links.

The import tool provides you with a switch that lets you run it in attach reference mode. This allows you to pass an Excel file which consists of a table of parent object IDs, child object IDs and reference filenames, so that you can resolve references within drawing files after they’ve been imported into the docbase. Thereby allowing you to use a tool such as Caliente (Shameless Plug™) to import the drawings into Documentum and update the properties. Then create the Excel file with all the references and run the CADtop import tool to attach them.

The end result will be that when you open one of these drawings through AutoCAD, CADtop will automatically pull out all the references from the Documentum repository and display them, just as in the legacy system.

It’s simple.  The new Content I/O Suite.  Armedia’s Content I/O Suite allows users to collect information from all of those billions of sources, migrate it to the centralized repository in the company, and then, if needed, deliver that information to the different web portals that may need to view the information later.  In fact, it can even send the information to multiple repositories all from the same interface.  So what if Human Resources uses Documentum, and Accounting uses Laserfiche, and some departments have their own collaborative eRoom set up, but you just merged with another company who uses SharePoint and FileNet.  What if one user could capture the information coming in from the website, or through email, or through regular snail mail, and deliver it into the appropriate system, without that one user ever having to be trained in each of those systems?  Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?  Check it out at http://armedia.com/products/suite/.

-Kristin Evans