If our Documentum clients are talking about anything, it's D6's compatibility with SOA environments and Documentum's snuggling up to Sharepoint.

The enthused chatter among those mapping-out their ECM strategies for next year is that tags, metadata and other code that would have prevented Documentum from interacting with other technologies have all been stripped out of D6.

And what's been added? Pre-configured options and development capabilities via an IDE that uses Eclipse open-source tools. The promise: faster rollouts.

What else? Documentum seems to have all but surrendered its front-end by saying that it wants to be the backend of Sharepoint. And some companies are already buying.

From what I've read the biggest impact will be felt by ERoom users because EMC might slow its development of that product. (I'm not saying this is right, but it is what I've read.) EMC is also likely to lose some of its potential, smaller ECM customers who can get the job done with SharePoint.

No one is suggesting that Documentum is going away. It just seems that it's going to have to share its space with Sharepoint.

The favorite quote I've read is by Ovum's analyst Mike Davis. He says, "the 800lb gorilla [has] shaved off the fur and got a six-pack."