When I ask customers what impressed them at EMC World, the most common answer I get, from non-developer types, is Transactional Content Management (TCM). Though I've defined TCM in previous posts, my notes from Mark Lewis's press briefing say that it's: "a solution platform uniquely optimized for business agility that enables organizations to deliver highly adaptive and proactive customer-centric, content-centric applications."

It's a mouthful, I know, AND it's important to note that TCM is a solution NOT an application. What's the difference?

EMC's TCM is a customizable, configurable workflow that encompasses document input and capture (Captiva); monitoring and optimization (Documentum) and output (Document Sciences). It is not specifically designed for motor vehicle accident insurance claims, health insurance claims, mortgage processing etc..these are applications which can be built using EMC's TCM solution.

And what makes TCM the solution of choice for building the aforementioned applications?

The Document Sciences piece- it finishes the job Captiva started, and according to EMC, they've got the TCM solution on the market that does the whole job.

So what is Document Sciences? EMC says that they're "a market-leading global provider of customer communications management solutions." Or in simpler terms, the technology that produces highly personalized documents that say things like:

Dear Mr. X

In reference to your claim of DATE concerning the automobile accident that occurred on DATE at ADDRESS and the damage that occurred to your YEAR OF MANUFACTURE AND BRAND OF VEHICLE

What's special about the technology, and the TCM solution in general, is that it grabs all the right information, processes it and delivers it into exactly the right place. There's less human intervention necessary, less room for error, and no one has to waste time in the time-consuming and frustrating quest (manually or via query) for the right information.

xPression is Document Sciences' leading product. It's SOA-based framework looks like this:

If you're a professional who works with EMC technologies, welcome two new acronyms into your life. DOM (Document Output Management) and CCM (Customer Communications Management).

When EMC purchased Document Sciences late last year, Industry Analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe called the latter a "a long established and well regarded firm that had a longstanding presence in the document output world, delivering software to manage highly complex, high volume publishing scenarios."

And interestingly, if you wanted to make a case for blogger Apoorv Durga prompting Joe Tucci to go shopping for a Document Sciences type product (and I'm having fun with the idea, NOT trying to make the case), you could. Here's what he wrote more than a year before EMC's purchase of Document Sciences:

I think document composition should be part Content Management systems. However, the integration with ECM products is still not very common. Based on the trends that I have seen, I think this is a feature that more and more clients would want to implement. Hence, the ECM vendors will certainly need to offer this feature to differentiate from others. They will either need to build this capability or buy niche products and integrate them.

If they haven't already, there's no question that companies like IBM/FileNet and OpenText will respond by upgrading their own TCM solutions. I doubt that this worries Tucci very much. Though I don't have an exact quote, he seems rather relaxed about head-on competition; I imagine him saying something like this: "We got there first, so we have some time to get better at integrating the technology and optimizing it to market needs. Our competition will be playing catch up for a while."