Unified Architecture

The Documentum platform provides a unified environment for capturing, storing, accessing, organizing, controlling, retrieving, delivering, and archiving any type of unstructured information across an extended enterprise. With robust yet flexible support for today's Web 2.0 information requirements and support for high-volume transaction and archive environments, Documentum remains the premier content management platform for global enterprise deployments.

Based on an extensible, open, scalable, secure, and service-oriented architecture that meets the needs of global, distributed organizations, Documentum comprises a set of integrated products and services that work together to provide powerful content-enabled solutions. From creation or capture, categorization, and electronic storage through just-in-time delivery and archiving, the Documentum end-to-end content management solution solves a range of strategic business challenges.

• Global and distributed — For enterprises with sites and customers around the world, Documentum handles users and content regardless of physical location. It includes unique content-caching capabilities for high-performance content management to any place around the world. The architecture stores multilingual content and metadata in shared repositories to accommodate local languages and currencies, forming a single virtual repository that spans geographical boundaries and languages.
• Extensible — Documentum can be extended to meet unique operational needs by embedding business rules or custom-designed content objects. Documentum incorporates a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that exploits the capabilities of web services for integrating with disparate enterprise applications. Customized plug-ins can be developed and deployed in key areas including user authentication, rich media handling, and legacy storage support.
• Open — Because Documentum is standards-based, it easily integrates with existing IT infrastructures. There are standard Documentum APIs for WebDAV, FTP, SMB, JDBC, and the web services standard, WSDL. The architecture is fully J2EE compliant (for web-based applications) and completely supports the Microsoft .NET environment and XML processing. Moreover, Documentum integrates "out-of-the-box" with enterprise applications and systems, including directory services using the LDAP standard.
• Scalable — Documentum provides a foundation for high-volume transaction and archive solutions. As the content management needs of an organization grow larger and more complex, the Documentum solution efficiently manages ever-increasing volumes of content, high-traffic loads, more users, and complex workflow processes-and it does so cost-effectively with continued high performance. Documentum addresses the network latency and large-scale distribution issues that global enterprises face. The Documentum architecture takes full advantage of the underlying hardware platform's scalability by utilizing multiprocessor systems as well as caching and clustering environments (vertical and horizontal scalability).
• Secure — Documentum enforces appropriate levels of security as organizations make their repository content available to a wide range of contributors and users. Access control lists define the users, groups, and roles that can access the repository or the discrete objects that it contains, as well as the operations that can be performed. Sensitive information in the repository file stores can be encrypted. Network communications among servers and with desktop clients can be secured through the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). Documentum also supports electronic signatures and offers extensive auditing of all system activities. Finally, Documentum secures roving content-documents and other objects that are moving around the network and beyond the purview of the repository.
• Easy to use — Ease of use is one of the primary objectives of EMC Documentum. We've paid particular attention to improving ease of use so that administrators can quickly set up the EMC Documentum platform, integrate it with other enterprise systems, and easily customize EMC Documentum functionality. Documentum Composer, our Eclipse-based platform for designing, deploying, and maintaining EMC Documentum applications, provides additional functionality for ease of development. Additionally, EMC Documentum enables end users to intuitively understand and rapidly start using our products.