Documentum eroom Team Collaboration Support Software

Transcription

1 Karen M. Shegda Product Report 21 July 2003 Documentum eroom Team Collaboration Support Software Summary Documentum eroom is a Web-based software application for team support and project collaboration. It lets enterprises share information, capture and preserve knowledge, manage projects and resolve issues. Note Documentum acquired eroom Technology in December Documentum continues to sell eroom as a stand-alone offering and as a hosted version. In addition, Documentum released eroom Enterprise, which provides the first level of integration with the Documentum 5 Content Management platform. Version 7.0 of eroom was announced in July Enhancements include native, Web-based project management capabilities, enterprise search and site navigation, a federated multiserver architecture and increased security features. Table of Contents Overview Analysis Pricing Competitors Strengths Limitations Recommended Gartner Research Insight List Of Tables Table 1: Specifications: Documentum eroom Table 2: Features and Functions: Documentum eroom Gartner Reproduction of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. Gartner shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The reader assumes sole responsibility for the selection of these materials to achieve its intended results. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice.

2 Corporate Headquarters Documentum, Inc Koll Center Parkway Pleasanton, CA 94566, U.S.A. Tel: Fax: Internet: Overview A Web-based solution, Documentum eroom serves as the digital workplace for e-business collaboration. It provides tools for sharing information, capturing and preserving knowledge, managing collaborative processes, managing projects and resolving issues. It is designed to address the needs of crossfunctional or geographically dispersed project teams. With eroom, enterprises can also extend project collaboration to participants outside of the firewall. End users only need a browser to participate in an eroom. Documentum recommends that the eroom server software be installed on a dedicated server. Files can be stored on an application server. Metadata is stored in a Structured Query Language (SQL) database. Documentum currently markets eroom as a stand-alone offering, as a hosted version (eroom.net) or integrated with its Documentum 5 content management platform (eroom Enterprise). The stand-alone version of eroom serves as the foundation for eroom Enterprise. Documentum eroom Enterprise integrates with the Documentum 5 platform, enabling organizations to collaboratively create, share, manage, deliver, reuse and archive the content and best practices supporting business operations. Documentum eroom Enterprise is an out-of-box solution that includes both real-time collaboration features, such as chat, whiteboard, desktop and application sharing, along with team collaboration capabilities, such as shared workspace, task management, project templates and role support. In addition to all of the core features of the eroom workplace, eroom Enterprise provides access to Documentum files, folders and cabinets from within the eroom environment and the ability to save files originating within eroom into the Documentum repository for centralized content management. eroom Enterprise customers get eroom with native integration to the content repository, the Documentum repository and one Doc Admin seat. For current eroom customers, a starter pack is available that includes the Documentum Content Server, Repository and seat package. For current Documentum customers, an eroom Starter Pack is available that includes an eroom Server and seat package. According to Documentum, the next level of integration between eroom 7 and Documentum 5 will be available by year-end Table 1: Specifications: Documentum eroom Product Type Team support software Current Version 7.0 Date Announced eroom (1.0), 1997; eroom (6.0), February 2002; Documentum eroom (7.0.1), July 21, 2003 eroom Enterprise, January 2003 Date Available Documentum eroom 7.0.1: July July

3 Table 1: Specifications: Documentum eroom Number Installed Architecture Server Hardware Supported Server Operating Systems Supported Web Servers Supported Client Operating Systems Supported Databases Supported Communication Protocols Supported System Administration Tools Native-Language Support User Interface Application Development Tools Application Integration Capabilities 1,100 clients with software licenses; 350 clients using hosted version. Represents over 1,000,000 seats. Web-based, client/server Pentium processor Windows NT 4.0 Server (with Service Pack 6a, Microsoft Windows 2000 Server or Advanced Server Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) 4 A Web browser either Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator running on Windows b98, NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Unix and Macintosh workstations Microsoft SQL Server 7 or SQL Server 2000 (for metadata) Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/Secure Hypertext Transport Protocol HTTPS) A server administrator installs the Documentum eroom software and manages server-wide settings that affect all eroom facilities on a particular server. The entire site may be remotely managed through the Web-based administration console or via the Snap-in for the Microsoft Management Console and Microsoft Windows 2000 Terminal Services. eroom 7 enables centralized control of the entire site as well as delegated administration to community and room level administrators. In addition, eroom provides detailed logging and reporting capabilities from the site level down to the eroom level, as well as a published SQL schema for custom reporting. Documentum eroom 7 is currently available in English only. French, German, Spanish, Italian and Korean versions will be available in the fourth quarter of Documentum eroom provides a browser-only interface (true thin client) with an optional plug-in that provides enhanced functionality. eroom also has a Web folder interface built on Windows Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) standard. Documentum eroom can be customized, or it supports the development of custom applications through the eroom Application Programming Interface (API) toolkit. It is based on Microsoft s Component Object Model (COM) technology and provides a Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)-compliant Extensible Markup Language (XML) interface. Through its APIs, eroom can interoperate with and exchange data with other legacy systems and repositories. eroom has prebuilt connectors for portal products from vendors such as Plumtree, SAP, Hummingbird and Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server. eroom also has connectors for integration with PeopleSoft ESA, PeopleSoft Financials and the PeopleSoft Portal. eroom partners and customers have built connectors to Lotus Notes, MS Project, SAP, i2 and Baan. Support for WebDAV enables integration with Microsoft Office 2000 applications, and support for Web Services Description Language (WSDL) enables integration within component-based architectures. 21 July

4 Table 1: Specifications: Documentum eroom System Requirements Client Server eroom Enterprise Web browser with plug-in: Pentium processor (133MHz minimum, 166MHz recommended) Minimum 32MB RAM (48MB recommended) Minimum 8MB free disk space Microsoft Windows 95 (with Service Pack 1 or 2); Windows 98 or NT 4.0 (with Service Pack 6a); Windows 2000 or Windows XP; Apple Macintosh OS 8.5 or 9.x; Sun Solaris 2.5 or higher; HP-UX or higher or Linux RedHat 7.x Netscape Navigator 4.7 or higher (version 6 is not currently supported) or Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher Pentium (300MHz Pentium minimum, 500MHz recommended) Minimum 125MB RAM (256MB RAM recommended) Minimum 100MB free disk space (175MB recommended) Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Server (with Service Pack 6a) and Microsoft IIS 4.0; Microsoft Windows 2000 Server or Advanced Server and Microsoft IIS 5.0 eroom or later Documentum Content Server or 5.1 Documentum Foundation Classes (DFC) version 5.1 installed on the same machine as eroom. In addition, the Documentum Connector must be enabled. Optionally, eroom provides integration with Documentum s Webtop interface for full content management. The Webtop patch (available from the Documentum download site) must be installed on the Webtop server. Table 2: Features and Functions: Documentum eroom Organization Viewing Access Control erooms are secure, Web-based workspaces for teams. Each eroom has its own uniform resource locator (URL). erooms can contain folders; discussions; notes; configurable databases (for managing tasks, issues, contacts and other key information); calendars; rolled-up project and process data; and configurable approval processes. Folders and all other objects can be nested. My erooms provides portal-like access to a user s frequently used erooms. Custom eroom structures and applications can be saved as templates for reuse. Custom viewer API installed at server level and optional CAD viewers with redline markup capabilities. The eroom Viewer for CAD Visualization supports over 200 file formats. Documentum eroom also offers a server-side viewer for Microsoft Project files. Documentum eroom provides object-oriented, multilevel access control. Access rights to erooms are determined by roles. Out-of-the-box roles include Administrator, which has full administration and access rights; Coordinator, which has full access; Participant, which can create new items and read or edit other members items, if permitted by the item s access rights; and Observer, which can only monitor eroom activity. Custom rolls can be created as part of an eroom template. Within the context of an approval process, different roles can be assigned. 21 July

5 Table 2: Features and Functions: Documentum eroom Security Integration Offline Support Library Services Polls and Alerts Threaded Discussions Real-Time Services Change Notification Search Security can be applied at the object level. Documentum eroom supports Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and 128-bit encryption. It works with third-party authentication packages, including RSA SecurID and Netegrity Siteminder. eroom synchronizes with Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directories or MS Windows Domains. eroom can also manage accounts locally with secure passwords and options for failed attempt lock-out, forced password change, required password length, password complexity and account locking. Supports Post Office Protocol 3 (POP3) and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) mail for sending alerts to users. Provides tight integration with Microsoft Outlook so that eroom can be accessed from within the Outlook interface. Through the Outlook Synchronizer, eroom Calendar events and Task Lists can be synchronized with Outlook. Although designed to be an online workspace, Documentum eroom does support disconnected workers by taking advantage of Microsoft Internet Explorer s offline functionality. It enables users to store, read and write to elements, including content and file attachments, of an eroom while they are disconnected from the network or Internet. The stand-alone version of Documentum eroom can perform basic document management features such as check-in/-out and version control. Documents can be added to an eroom via drag and drop from the desktop or from the File Save As option within Office 2000 or Office XP. With eroom Enterprise, documents and content can be saved to the Documentum repository, and file links to the eroom workplace are supported. It supports linked files that originate in eroom and linked files that originate in Documentum 5, linked folders and attachment fields, and editing of linked files. Polls can be created anywhere within an eroom, and they can be nested within other objects and accessed within a real-time meeting. Discussions can contain attachments. Discussions can be multithreaded and multitopic. Integrated real-time tools enable scheduled and on-demand real-time meetings from within the eroom environment. Real-time services support application and desktop sharing, group edits, one-to-many presentation mode with nonmember access, public and private chat, and whiteboard and annotation tools. Microsoft PowerPoint slides are automatically converted to graphic files. All edits, annotations and chat can be saved back to the eroom environment. Members are notified when items change. Notification can be via or instant messaging. Notifications can occur in real time or on a nightly basis, based on changes to a file, object or eroom. Documentum eroom embeds the Fulcrum full-text indexing and search engine. Users can search across erooms. With Version 7.0, search capabilities have been expanded to enable searching across all erooms within a site. Enables search by content, search by eroom and search for members. It provides relevance ranking. eroom Enterprise supports searching across all CM-linked files. 21 July

6 Table 2: Features and Functions: Documentum eroom Project Management Features Process Management Documentum eroom includes native Web-based project management capabilities. These include progress reporting, Gantt charts for task relationships and dependencies, task tracking, basic resource management, and automatic notification. In addition, the eroom Project Viewer provides the capability for users to view Microsoft Project data from within eroom. An optional Project Dashboard feature provides the capability to roll up and graphically display key project and process data across projects. Documentum eroom ships with an end-user configurable-process feature that enables documents or other eroom items to be routed through a predefined, multistep approval process. It supports linear processes out of the box. Nonlinear, rules-based workflows can be created through an API-based custom workflow processor. All processes can be saved as templates. Multiple open processes can be rolled up for global visibility into process status and bottlenecks. ERoom ships with six application templates for specific business applications. Custom application prototypes are available as a framework for building more complex vertical applications. Analysis To further extend the broad enterprise content management capabilities delivered with Documentum 5 and to build out its product portfolio to move toward a smart enterprise suite (SES), Documentum made two strategic acquisitions in the fall of 2002: collaboration vendor eroom and records management vendor TrueArc (formerly Provenance Systems). The eroom acquisition enables Documentum to address the ad hoc, work-in-process segment of the content life cycle in addition to the structured management and approval process. Team Manager and the eroom product suite have been rationalized as part of the integration process and are now known as Documentum eroom and eroom Enterprise. While eroom and Documentum 5 are still separate offerings and repositories, Documentum offers bundled pricing for the two and has completed the first steps toward integration. eroom Enterprise provides access to Documentum files, folders and cabinets within the eroom environment. A future release of eroom Enterprise (planned for year-end 2003) will enable bidirectional integration between eroom and Documentum 5. Documentum eroom stand-alone is a pure play-team support and enterprise collaboration application. Documentum s largest customers for eroom stand-alone are Ford Motor Company, with 230,000 seats, and Hewlett-Packard, with 131,000 seats. With eroom, Documentum targets several key vertical markets: life sciences, manufacturing, financial services, professional services and government. Applications for which the Documentum eroom product has been implemented include merger and acquisitions, collaborative product design, supplier relationship management, demand forecast collaboration, client engagement, proposal development and campaign management. Documentum eroom 7 is organized around the concepts of communities, facilities and sites. A community is a logical grouping of users and workspaces. Communities can span servers. A facility is a set of individual erooms, with a common pool of members that resides on a single server. It represents another layer of a logical organization. Each facility is part of a community; communities can contain multiple facilities. Facilities within a community share user roles and privileges. With Documentum eroom 7, Documentum introduced the concept of a Site, which is a federated group of eroom servers that provides a single point of access for end users and centralized services for administrators. 21 July

7 Pricing The Documentum eroom software lists for US$200 per named user for the user license plus a server access fee. Volume discounts are available. Annual maintenance is 18 percent of the total software license. eroom s average deal size is in the $100,000 range for a departmental implementation and $1 million or more for an enterprise deal. The hosted solution, eroom.net, is priced on a subscription basis for departmental usage or as a license model plus an incremental hosting fee for large-scale, enterprise deployments. GSA Pricing Yes. Competitors With eroom stand-alone, Documentum provides project- and process-centric collaboration for internal teams and for enabling enterprises and their suppliers, partners and customers to work together more efficiently. As a stand-alone team support tool, Documentum eroom s most direct competitors have been Lotus QuickPlace, Intraspect and SiteScape. To the extent that Open Text Livelink, imanage WorkSite and Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server can be used for Web-based collaboration, they compete against Documentum eroom in some situations. Open Text, in particular, provides strong competition because of its virtualteams module and the real-time collaboration features of Livelink MeetingZone. Intraspect Intraspect, a private company that comes from a knowledge management/collaboration heritage, provides a suite of software tools that enable enterprise collaboration and team support. Intraspect 5 consists of a collaborative application framework built on an open architecture Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) supporting Solaris and Windows servers and a set of collaborative knowledge services. It is designed to integrate collaboration into an enterprise s business processes. It lets enterprises create Web-based workspaces where project teams can come together to share knowledge and collaborate on documents and project tasks. Intraspect provides its own repository and can integrate with external repositories. Intraspect has about 200+ customers, many of which have multiple implementations. It has a strong understanding of collaboration and how to support it. IBM/Lotus Lotus QuickPlace is a Web-based tool that lets users share workspaces. QuickPlace is designed to help teams keep everything related to a certain subject or work project in a shared space, accessed via a Web site, where all team members can find it and interact concerning it. QuickPlace provides integration with Microsoft Office 2000, enabling users to author and publish content using Microsoft Office; it gives users the ability to assign action items and deadlines and provides online awareness and chat features. Given its emphasis on collaborative document and knowledge management, IBM Lotus Domino.Doc also represents potential competition for Documentum and eroom Enterprise in particular. IBM Lotus. Domino.Doc is positioned as a collaborative document management offering. It supports threaded discussions and real-time chat capabilities through integration with Lotus Sametime. Domino.Doc can also serve as the storage repository for other Domino-based applications, including Notes mail, generic Notes discussion documents and QuickPlace documents. SiteScape The SiteScape product is a longtime player in this market, but has not had the visibility of eroom or Intraspect. SiteScape Enterprise Forum includes document sharing and coauthoring, threaded 21 July

8 discussions, and chat and calendaring capabilities. It also supports postings directly into forums and enables enterprises to establish multiple workspaces (for example, project, departmental, corporate). SiteScape lacks some collaboration features, such as team to-do list and whiteboarding. imanage WorkSite Suite With the WorkSite suite, imanage moves farther away from its roots in document management toward providing integrated software that enables enterprises to optimize their value chains by enabling members to collaborate and exchange information. imanage has augmented WorkSite s core library services capabilities with support for threaded discussions and group calendaring/scheduling to support collaboration centered on documents or other content. In addition, it enables the creation of virtual-team spaces, called WorkSites, and provides a portal application for unified access to content. Within this context, imanage emphasizes the ability to share information objects as part of a project between organizational units or different corporate entities, particularly in processes that are distributed, negotiated and sensitive in nature. imanage has expanded its product suite with enhancements and new capabilities, such as report management capabilities and an management solution. In October 2002, imanage announced version 3.0 of its WorkSite MP offering and a new Java-based workflow solution, WorkRoute MP Pro. In addition, it provides real-time collaboration services through WorkTeam RealTime, which is based on a partnership with WebEx. Through the WebEx integration, which is HTML based, imanage users can conduct online meetings. It also supports whiteboarding and application sharing. Open Text Livelink Open Text is positioned as a smart enterprise suite vendor, ranking as a Visionary in Gartner s Smart Enterprise Suite Magic Quadrant. Smart enterprise suites aggregate the functionality offered today by portals, team collaboration support and content management software products. Open Text s roots, however, lie in document management where it has a proven track record and a significant installed base (over 5,000 customer installations). Open Text has augmented Livelink s core capabilities with a rich set of project management and collaboration/group scheduling capabilities. Livelink s core functionality consists of services for team collaboration, business process automation, document and knowledge management, information retrieval and group scheduling/calendaring. Its strengths include a distributed, scalable and open Web-centric architecture and extensive XML support. Open Text has added Webbased, real-time meeting capabilities, including whiteboarding, group chat and application sharing, to Livelink. In addition, Livelink virtualteams is a fully integrated team environment built on Livelink s project workspaces. Through Livelink UNITE, Open Text supports integration into various portal frameworks and supports iviews for the SAP Enterprise Portal. In addition, Open Text acquired portal vendor, Corechange. With this acquisition, Open Text has closed the gap in its portal functions and improved its position among vendors of smart enterprise suites. Open Text had a portal-like user interface, mylivelink, but it was weak compared to true portal products. Compared to team support offerings like Documentum eroom, however, Livelink is substantially more complex and requires more training, support and work design. Microsoft Through Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server and SharePoint Team Services, Microsoft addresses the team support market, but it doesn t yet match the leaders in terms of vision. SharePoint Portal Server is essentially a document-centric portal, designed for use by knowledge workers who need to find, share and publish information. It provides ad hoc and collaborative document management functionality for Microsoft Office users. Documents are created as drafts that can be shared by a set of authors without being visible to readers. In addition, it provides users with the ability to discuss documents without modifying them through support for threaded discussions. Users can access Web discussions from the 21 July

9 browser and from the Office 2000 collaboration toolbar. In April 2003, Microsoft announced details for the next version of its portal software, SharePoint Portal Server, which is now in a second beta release. Microsoft will change the product s name to Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server. In the first version, SharePoint relied on SharePoint Team Services, an Office extension, for collaborative capabilities. Now Windows SharePoint Services puts those functions in the operating system. Strengths Enterprise Capable Version 7.0 of Documentum eroom brings new and enhanced capabilities for supporting enterprise implementations. These include centralized, multi-server member management, administration and reporting. It also allows enterprises to distribute customizations across a site and supports federated servers. In addition, Documentum eroom can be configured for high availability. Through the Windows Cluster service, Documentum eroom supports failover capabilities by enabling clusters of physical servers to act as one logical server. Clustering is supported on Windows 2000 Advanced Server only and SQL Server 2000 only, as well as on any hardware configurations in which Microsoft Cluster service is supported for Windows. Real-Time Collaboration Features Documentum eroom supports both asynchronous and synchronous collaboration. Real-time collaboration services are a core capability. They include one-to-many chat, one-to-many presentation modes with nonmember access, application and desktop sharing. Ease of Use Documentum eroom is an out-of-the box application that is designed for ease of use. It provides an intuitive, Web-browser user interface. Wizards facilitate the creation of erooms. Documentum eroom is tightly integrated with Microsoft Office XP and Microsoft Outlook, leveraging the familiar desktop tools already in place. eroom ships with six sample erooms. It supports drag-and-drop file sharing from the desktop. End users can create erooms on the fly without involving IT resources and can self-administer them. Basic Project Management Features The new release of Documentum eroom contains basic project management features. Documentum is not attempting to become a project management tool, but rather to offer knowledge workers a team support tool that also enables them to perform basic project management functions. The Project Dashboard enables key-project and process data to be rolled up and graphically displayed for multiple initiatives. In addition, it enables Microsoft Project data to be viewed from within eroom. Limitations Platform Limitations Documentum eroom is a Microsoft-centric offering. It is tied to Microsoft platforms and architecture. Although the Web browser can run on a variety of platforms, the Documentum eroom server application runs only on Microsoft Windows NT and Windows API is COM-based with a SOAP interface. It does not provide support for Java development tools or run on J2EE servers. The Web server support is only Microsoft IIS. Limited Out-of-the-Box Workflow Capabilities for eroom Stand-Alone 21 July

10 Out of the box, Documentum eroom stand-alone includes support for basic process automation capabilities, but those are limited to linear approval processes and for enterprise rollup of project and process data. Through the API, however, enterprises with more sophisticated workflow needs, such as support for parallel processes, can develop custom applications. The eroom API includes a custom workflow processor. Recommended Gartner Research The Smart Enterprise Suite Magic Quadrant for 2003, M Magic Quadrant: Team Collaboration Support, M Insight Consider Documentum eroom stand-alone if you require a team support tool that can be rolled out rapidly and is geared for nontechnical users. For project-oriented environments, Documentum eroom s mature features and ease of implementation and deployment are attractive. Consider Documentum eroom Enterprise or alternatives if you require sophisticated document/content management or workflow capabilities or if you have heterogeneous server (for example, Windows NT/2000, Unix) and development (Java) environments. 21 July