Craig’s Musings

This afternoon, colleagues Mike Mohen and Paul Kwitkin presented a well-attended session, “Documentum Foundation Services – Best Practices and Real World Examples.” It’s always a good thing to have someone else be able to tell folks how well your software performs under load and back it up with hard numbers and context. Usually this session takes about four hours to present in depth; so, Mike and Paul did a good job distilling the essence down to just an hour or so.

Mike and Paul work in CMA’s Professional Services organization, helping customers deploy enterprise solutions that typically involve out of the box services from DFS as well as custom service development and custom service consumer (solution) development. What we do in engineering it what Professional Services does in terms of building services and service consumers. It’s also the very same advice offered at today’s session, which will be repeated on Thursday. So, this material is not just about you, our audience, but it’s very much about EMC, too.

I’ve already asked Mike for his presentation, demos and source code; so, once I receive this content, I’ll make it available here. It should also become available on the just-launched Documentum Solution Exchange.

Earlier today, I sat in on Victor Spivak’s “Documentum Architecture Deep Dive” session. (Pie blogged about this session in a fair bit of detail here and here.) As you might expect, DFS was a prominently discussed within the broader context of all Documentum architecture. (For those who don’t know, Victor is EMC Content Management and Archiving division’s Chief Architect. Victor is also an EMC Fellow and a really good guy.)

It’s really quite exciting to see such a consistently strong turn-out for the developer-oriented sessions at this year’s EMC World conference–much stronger than last year. It’s a privilege to have so many folks interested in what you’ve worked so hard with others to produce–both to tell you what works and what doesn’t.

Already this week I’ve received great feedback that will make DFS an even better product in future releases. Once my customer meetings this week subside a bit, I hope to share what I’ve learned with you here in more detail.

Update 5/21/2008: Here are the slides Mike and Paul presented. Looks like the real world examples will be available over on the solution exchange soon. For example, I just uploaded the DFS Windows shell namespace extension for Windows Explorer created by colleague John Sweeney here. Cheers.

Update 10/24/2008: You can access the recording of this session, now, here.