When an organization’s IT infrastructure requires a solid collaboration environment, Microsoft SharePoint is there to fill that requirement. Nevertheless, SharePoint may be full of features and capabilities, but is still short of the needed elements to become a powerful content management system. Thus, SharePoint must be embedded with other solutions to work effectively with different requirements and environments.
The easy-to-use user interface of SharePoint, along with its robust underlying technologies, resulted in the proliferation of sites that organizations thought were the mere solutions for their needs, not realizing that things could get out of hand with SharePoint alone. Documentum provides the components needed by SharePoint to become a stable and long-term partner of businesses that rely mostly on concrete enterprise content management and strong collaboration tools. EMC Documentum is designed to bring solutions from migration to document management.
My Documentum for Microsoft SharePoint is an EMC Documentum solution that provides the facility needed by end users to view content from an EMC Documentum server through SharePoint. This is done by integrating web parts in SharePoint that serve as mediators for accessing files across different repositories. End users will be able to perform functions and tasks on their documents, like working directly in SharePoint, leaving the application with enough space to leverage its performance. Users will be greeted with a replica of the SharePoint interface that accesses Documentum repositories.
EMC Documentum Repository Services for Microsoft SharePoint, on the other hand, is a Documentum management solution that allows SharePoint to store content in different repositories. The redirection of the repository is made possible through the use of Microsoft’s External Blob Storage (EBS) API, along with an API handler developed by EMC to maintain data links within SharePoint documents. Binary data is channeled to a different storage system while leaving the document’s metadata in SharePoint, reducing the load on SharePoint’s SQL server. The Documentum repository receives the channeled binary data together with a copy of the metadata obtained from SharePoint.
Another Documentum and SharePoint merger is the EMC Documentum Archive Services for SharePoint. The merger is used to transfer documents stored in SharePoint’s SQL server into Documentum’s repository. Transferred documents will retain their links, metadata, and mapped objects.