Though we at BrilliantLeap didn't experience a slow down in demand during the first two quarters of this year, our consulting customers told us that their markets were slowing. Nothing to panic about but not the usual double-digit growth either.

And in listening to the hundreds of Documentum business process and technology owners we talk to each week, they spoke about ECM options without the usual dismissals, Documentum isn't the ECM default it once was.

It's perhaps a given that no single technology vendor can dominate forever (unless you're Microsoft); and competition, though not always fun, is generally good for everyone - it keep vendors innovating with new features and benefits; it gives customers choices; it gives architects and developers new tools and new toys; and it creates new employment and consulting opportunities.

So will EMC's release of D6, with its focus on ease and speed of deployment using services-oriented architecture (SOA) for development, configuration and caching upgrades aimed at IT departments be the ticket?

EMC and other ECM vendors like IBM/FileNet, Oracle/Stellent, OpenText ( and some would put Microsoft SharePoint into this group) are preaching that an ECM platform needs to be a corporate standard (EMC says it's part of the Infrastructure) and that it needs to be easily deployable. So EMC has re-architected and "opened-up" (to use EMC marketing jive) its API.

Word on the street is (and we're qualifying this by stating that we are not now nor ever have been developers) that's where importing a directory into the system used to require a multi-step process; the D6 API offers a simple "create-object" service. It's also reported that Documentum-developer-dialect (aka proprietary terminology) has been replaced with developer-friendly labels describing exactly what the services do.

And those Builder and Installer components you've always used? They've been replaced with Documentum Composer, which offers a set of Eclipse-based tools that are said to offer greater consistency as you switch between tools. Eclipse automatically tracks dependencies and maintains context when you switch between tools, minimizing the possibility of deployment problems.

The marketing hype says that configuration capabilities have been extended as well; application interfaces can be customized to fit workflows, life cycles, roles, locations, object types, and so on, without development delays. The changing context of content can now be handled by an "Aspects" control which, for example, allows for different document types to have different retention and life cycle controls, but to automatically become records as soon as they're e-mailed outside the organization. "Aspects" also enables contextual control across document types and are triggered by events or other indicators.

How has EMC chosen to publicize the new-developer friendly Documentum? The EMC Web Services Challenge, of course. Will it be 100k well-spent?

And perhaps more importantly, will ease of deployment bring new customers to what is quickly becoming the EMC-platform? Or will current Documentum customers continue to be intrigued by OpenSource and Microsoft solutions and their price tags?

Technorati tags: Documentum, EMC, SharePoint, ECM, Enterprise Content Management, Filenet, OpenText, WebServices, SOA, Eclipse