There were other early adapters to Documentum as well. Aerospace companies used it to keep manuals and training logs up to date, Investment Banks used it to create pitchbooks, Insurance companies used it for policies, and Legal departments of state governments used it to track legislative processes.

And most of those early adapters still use Documentum today.

The individuals who were selected for Documentum training typically came from the Imaging and Information Management parts of IT and were strong with either Scanning, WorkFlow technologies or were Visual Basic programmers. They often thought of themselves as having "eveolved" from document capture and storage to document management. The evolution of enabling technologies seemed bigger than that of moving from record albums to audio tapes to CD's to iPods.

Visual Basic and Powerbuilder were the Documentum interface languages. The Java APIs came much later.

Why all this history?

In part to offer later Documentum adapters a bit of history and in part to console early adapters who have told me that they feel the EMCing of Documentum has altered what would have been its product development course.

To the latter group I suggest that Documentum isn't just Documentum anymore. Documentum is now a component of EMC Software. And EMC Software's market offering is "complete, end-to-end information infrastructure solutions," according to Balaji Yelamanchilin, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Content Management & Archiving at EMC. Documentum is but one of Yelamanchilin's software children and as opposed to Open Source offerings, EMC's strategy (except when it comes to SharePoint) seems to be to keep its customers drinking from the EMC pond. It's certainly a sound business strategy.

And EMC's product offering should certainly be enjoying its time in the sun with ILM emerging as a corporate mandate.

And unlike Documentum Inc. which seemed to be taking its offerings more and more toward the web, EMC's sweet-spot is clearly in storage. I'm not suggesting that that's all EMC is into, but they seem to have given way to SharePoint in presentation in one place. And compared to open source vendors like Alfresco they're a little behind with Web 2.0 tools.

What does this mean to the Documentum application developer who wants to produce more and more sexy solutions? Does it mean diversifying your skills portfolio with non-EMC technologies?

Or to those that are into religion-EMC, does it mean learning more about Captiva and Verid which EMC just acquired.

No matter what you do, it's not just about Documentum anymore. That's just my opinion, of course, but my guess is that many of you are saying "Dun-uh".

And the step forward I referred to in the headline. Check out GSK's Alli Blog! Regulated content in the wild, wild websphere!

Hats off to GSK for pushing the envelope!