EMC recently announced their Documentum Enterprise Content Management (ECM) 6.5, a suite of products that embraces Web 2.0 concepts and applies them to the enterprise, a smart move. I spoke with Lance Shaw, their Group Product Marketing Manager for Knowledge Worker Solutions a few days ago to get an overview of this release. They are providing a bridge between traditional web content management and tools and Web 2.0 to allow their clients to take advantage of the new opportunities that many inside the enterprise have seen on the consumer web. This includes simplicity, ease of use, flexibility, open APIs for data sharing, increased social aspects, and enhanced collaboration. At the same time they are still ensuring corporate security, compliance, archiving, and scalability. This latter set of more traditional features should ease adoption by decision makers, just as the Web 2.0 related features will help adoption and use by the newest generation of workers and others of any generation that have been exposed to the new consumer web.

Here are some of the components of the new release. There are quite a few. Lance said that one of Documentum’s guiding principles is to offer the simplicity found in many Web 2.0 tools, without losing the complexity of a fully functioning content management. They have put many of these security, policy, access, and governance issues under the covers.

Documentum CenterStage Essentials is a new client for knowledge workers that is being released as a free online beta. The completely redesigned interface is easy to use and features shared team workspaces, guided search and simple Documentum access. It allows teams to create workspaces on the fly and have the content stay with Documentum. The ability to use tags and produce tag clouds is included. The screen shot below shows you how you can see details about the document by hovering over it.

Documentum Media WorkSpace is a new rich media interface which provides users a personalized, dynamic and familiar way to view, find, compare, annotate, review and share rich media assets.

My Documentum is a new lightweight client that is completely integrated with the desktop providing users with immediate access to the latest versions of content they use most often, as well as allowing them to access and work on documents when they are not connected to the server.

Documentum Web Publisher Page Builder is a newly designed, Flex-based Web authoring interface that provides non-technical business users and authors with an interactive and simple tool to create Web experiences.

Documentum TaskSpace has been enhanced to deliver an easily configurable, all-in-one user experience that combines content, process, high-fidelity forms and monitoring to that aligns with business processes to increase productivity.

Documentum XML Store is a new native XML database available within the Documentum platform and related content delivery applications. It underlies much of their new offerings. Documentum’s XML capabilities consist of robust management of XML documents and components, search and query of XML content, dynamic delivery and content transformation applications for content repurposing and personalized publishing. It allows for more granular information access.

EMC Documentum Federated Records Services (FRS) extends records management capabilities to provide a single system of record for business content that needs to be preserved for governance and compliance purposes, regardless of location or system. FRS enables content that resides in other repositories to be managed by Documentum allowing improved policy enforcement and management, improved compliance and records capture and lowered cost of discovery.

EMC Documentum Business Activity Monitor (BAM) has been enhanced to utilize Flex-based technologies that deliver business performance dashboards that provide interactive charts and graphs indicating process status, bottlenecks and other business performance events. Dashboards are updated in real time and are embedded within Documentum TaskSpace to provide a single point of control for business processes. This is in line with the increased transparency found in enterprise 2.0.

All of these products in Documentum ECM 6.5 are now available except for CenterStage Essentials and My Documentum, which will be available later in the current quarter (Q3 2008). They are also planning a mashup designer to take advantage of the open APIs they offer and allow users to stay within the Documentum tool set as they create mashups.

This comprehensive suite incorporates social features such as access to user profiles. When a search is done, documents are returned but also links to profiles of the people who created them. You get the social side of search. They have also looked at innovations from the consumer web to help conceive some of the features in this suite. For example, you can also filter searches in a way similar to iTunes to narrow down the search pool. It’s nice to see a traditional enterprise content management provider understand the benefits of Web 2.0 and incorporate them in a way that makes business sense. You can see an example of guided search below.