I interrupted my three-part post on EMC's Transactional Content Management solution (TCM) because I wanted to make readers aware of EMC's vision for Friction-less computing BEFORE I wrote about the Documentum-portion of TCM. Why? Because it looks like a solution that's approaching friction-lessness. (It may be important to note that I think about "friction-less" primarily from the software side. Chuck Hollis, EMC's Vice President of Technology Alliances, defines it more broadly in his blog; he describes it as "a self-service, few-questions-asked environment." )

Sounds good, doesn't it? As simple as launching a web browser. And a potent answer to Joe Tucci's (COB and CEO of EMC) concern that there's still too much involvement from IT.

All that being said, let's look at the Documentum part of EMC's TCM solution which enlists Documentum Application, Documentum Archive Services for Imaging, Documentum Process Suite (BPM), and Documentum Task Space. According to Mark Lewis, President of EMC Software's CMA division, Documentum Task Space(which is an easy-to-use interface that enables you to quickly retrieve documents and perform high-volume transaction processing) will be getting a new, improved interface in Q3 of 2008.

When TaskSpace was first introduced in D6, self-proclaimed (but seemingly undisputed) Documentum Guru, Johnny Gee called it," a configurable framework is built on the Forms Builder technology. Using Forms Builder, a systems analyst (non-developer) can build a simple application within days or change the UI in real-time." While this may not yet spell friction-less...

The TaskSpace upgrade isn't the only change coming for TCM. EMC's Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) product will be integrated into Documentum and TaskSpace later this year as well. For anyone who is unfamiliar with the BAM product, it came to EMC through the acquisition of ProActivity which described itself as " the most flexible, scalable, and cost effective business process optimization solution available today. Our customer's return on investment is typically measured in weeks, not months". Dave DeWalt, who was the President of EMC Software at the time, explained the purchase to the press as follows:

"Almost daily, customers stress to me their strategic need to optimize their business processes such as invoice processing, claims processing and loan origination. Manual process design and requirements definition is expensive, tedious, slow, error prone and widely recognized as the root cause of project failure. ProActivity brings to EMC a critical content management technology set to augment and enhance EMC's ability to address these needs through the industry-leading EMC Documentum business process management (BPM) software suite."

For anyone who wants to read up on an analysis of EMC's BPM tools, Sandy Kemsley describes them in great detail.

So how was Documentum's TCM received? I fear industry analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe would tell me that I've asked the wrong question. He says that "ECM (Enterprise Content Management) is now CMA (Content Management and Archiving)" at EMC (almost suggesting that if we want to find Documentum, as we once knew it, in EMC CMA's product line we'll have to dig for it). But that being said, he also called TCM, "the star at EMC" and claimed that with it "EMC has a strong hand to play."

Customers I've spoken with, even those who are Documentum devotees, like the commercial. The biggest question I've heard from them is whether Documentum/EMC/CMA has the best BPM tool on the market. After all, BEA has its Aqualogic product and given that both Weblogic and Oracle (which are now owned by the same company) exist in a multitude of enterprises, defining what a single vendor enterprise solution  looks like may not be as simple as it seems.