EMC offers biz barons tools to manipulate their digital assets

Bring down the rain by furtling that cloud

EMC has clearly cottoned on to the security and management problems posed by the growing enterprise cloud as well as BYOD in business, and clearly thinks it is going to sell quite a bit of content management software, if its latest barrage of announcements are anything to go by.

The new gear includes updated kit from Documentum, Captiva, SourceOne and Syncplicity. These are EMC Information Intelligence Group products and EMC says they are optimised for cloud deployment. There are eight announcements in all.

Documentum Platform 7.0: EMC says it delivers "breakthrough performance and scalability" with a dramatic lowering of total cost of ownership. There are no numbers supplied to back this up. It's claimed to have simpler and faster deployment into VMware-based private cloud environments. V7.0 has FIPS 140-2 Level 1 compliance, and EMC claims end user search productivity improvements through xPlore, a search engine that includes "thesaurus support, automated indexing, integrated content analytics and faceted navigation." This provides faster and better searching, according to EMC.

EMC says: "Documentum 7 can deliver up to 50 per cent lower CPU utilisation over the previous version, utilise up to 55 per cent less memory at scale, and can offer an up to 6x improvement in user load [and an] up to 3-5x improvement in end-user response time."

The Documentum Platform is available via EMC OnDemand as a private cloud deployment hosted model, fully managed by EMC staff. Read more about OnDemand here.

Documentum xCP 2.0 is for business and case management situations, such as contracts management, invoice automation and accounts payable. EMC says V2.0 has a better "user experience, content and process analytics".

The xCP 2.0 release includes a library of pre-built components, available as free downloads in the EMC Community Network (ECN). The company claims the new software reduces "deployment time from weeks to hours by orchestrating the automated provisioning of environments into the VMware private cloud." Apple iPads are supported, by the way.

Documentum xCP 2.0 is available through EMC's OnDemand cloud service.

Documentum Information Rights Management 5.1 is for secure mobile access to protected information inside an enterprise's firewall. V5.1 "enables iPad and iPhone users to access and browse IRM-protected enterprise content as part of a typical business process." It is integrated with the Documentum platform and also works with file shares and other enterprise content management repositories.

Captiva 7.0, the paper-document scanning application, has a new configurable desktop client and v7.0 is claimed to "simplify the development and deployment of enterprise capture projects."

EMC says "Captiva Advanced Recognition includes patent-pending text classification technology that significantly increases the accuracy rates for incoming documents.... Captiva automatically learns documents while in production by intelligently determining words and patterns to use for classifying a document."

There is a Captiva Designer tool which "enables teams to easily configure data entry forms and validation rules, with point-and-click layout of fields and controls to promote context-aware indexing and validation."

Captiva is cloud-ready and available via EMC OnDemand,

Document Sciences xPression 4.5, a mailshot tool, extends Microsoft Word to simplify the creation of multi-channel communications. It's said to run faster and have a "single rules-based template to control the appropriate use of channel-specific content and formatting".

SourceOne File Intelligence 4.7 finds documents distributed throughout an organisation's IT infrastructure. This release helps customers better manage the retention, disposition and and remediation of electronic records and files. It's claimed to deliver better performance, scalability and connectivity to other enterprise repositories.

SourceOne eDiscovery - Kazeon 4.7 is claimed to "accelerate early case assessment, reduce review costs by more than 50 per cent and enhance ... internal investigations with breakthrough performance and scalability."

Syncplicity, EMC's file synchronisation and sharing product, has been integrated with Documentum. Syncplicity Connector to Documentum Platform and xCP automates the distribution to end user's devices of Documentum document content. The xCP Designer is used to visually design, customise and deploy applications to do this.

With Syncplicity Mobile 2.0, "users [can] automatically push selected files and folders to mobile devices whenever updates occur to gain offline access to the latest content without having to download it first."

Apple iPad and iPhone users are supported by this release, which can be downloaded from the Apple Store.

EMC says Syncplicity/Documentum use cases include: "publishing regulated sales and marketing collateral to remote sales teams for offline access in industries such as pharmaceuticals and life sciences; publishing standard operating procedures (SOPs) and controlled content in manufacturing; publishing deal books in financial services; and handling document transmittals in the oil and gas [area]."

It adds: "Syncplicity integration with Documentum xCP enables developers to visually design, customise and deploy applications that automatically or manually distribute content from their Documentum repository via Syncplicity."

This looks to be a thorough-going update of the IIG product set and expending its deployment through the OnDemand private cloud service looks to be a continuing smart move. It's odd that content management and the Big Data idea seem not to be aligned. This is bound to change and a dose of Big Data glamour could sex-up EMC's IIG products. ®