I was one of about 30 people to be fortunate enough to attend one of the more interesting sessions at EMC World for Documentum. Interesting in that it was all about implementing Web 2.0 solutions on top of the platform. Fortunate enough in that, for some reason, the session was scheduled for the last session of the last day. This meant for east coasters like me taking a red-eye home after losing more money at the tables.
“Taking Advantage of Social Computing with Documentum” presented EMC’s architecture in a light that would use it’s libraries for that would allow vendors to develop WIKIs, BLOGs and 360 networks that take advantage of the platform. But other than saying they would look to open standards such as OpenSocial (or the new standard Facebook Platform announced yesterday) but would probably end up down a different path, they didn’t get to deep into how. At least EMC is thinking about how to work with others on Web2.0. And they did show how it was being done in the real world, specifically with Jive Software.
The session showed how Jive’s Clearspace had been integrated with Documentum to show the relationships of individuals to content stored within Documentum. When looking at an individual’s record in Clearspace you could now see all the content they had authored, discussions around that content, and other collaborative aspects. And EMC is using it in-house.
Sounds a lot like iTeam to me. For those that don’t remember iTeam, it was Documentum’s attempt at collaboration lead by John Newton. Unlike other collaboration applications that focused on collaborative communications/ interactions, iTeam was about collaboration on the creation of content. It specifically focused on associating individuals and conversations with content within projects. Unfortunately five years ago it was difficult to explain that there were different flavors of collaboration, so iTeam was replaced with the eRoom acquisitions.
Well looks like Jive has recognized that the market is coming around to document focused collaboration. Let’s see how long it takes before EMC remembers they were there first.