Documentum 6 (D6) and Your Services Oriented Architecture (SOA)

By Pawan Kumar Oct 26, 2007

EMC Documentum is a leading player in the enterprise content management space. That's not news. What is, is the way the company has, with the release of Documentum v6 (D6), embraced Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) as a first-class principle in its core architecture.

D6 Presents a Full SOA Story

While Documentum v5.3 had support for implementing web services via the Web Services Framework (WSF), it was a relatively limited set of technologies designed for making Service-based Business Objects (SBO) available as web services. Essentially, you could take a piece of business logic in Documentum and make a web service out of it.

Suppose that there is custom logic to validate the provided information, store a document in a Documentum repository, and then send it as an email attachment to a specified recipient. WSF would allow you to make this functionality available as a web service.

D6 introduces Documentum Foundation Services (DFS), which is an entirely new set of products that completely replaces WSF. DFS enables development and deployment of ECM services and service consumers using a true service oriented architecture. Let’s explore what DFS has to offer.

Introducing Documentum Foundation Services (DFS)

DFS provides a set of ready made services and tools for creating custom services and service consumers. The DFS-provided services are called Enterprise Content Services (ECS) and include the following:

Object Service: provides fundamental operations for creating, retrieving, updating, and deleting repository objects. Copy and move operations are also available.
Version Control Service: provides operations such as checkin and checkout that concern object versions.
Query Service: provides operations for obtaining data from repositories using ad-hoc queries.
Schema Service: provides operations for examining repository metadata (data dictionary).
Search Service: provides operations concerning full-text and property-based repository searches.
Workflow Service: provides operations that obtain data about workflow process templates and an operation for starting a workflow process instance.

Note that all of the above functionality (and more) is available through Documentum Foundation Classes (DFC). ECS makes the above functionality available as web services which are ready to be consumed by applications or other custom services that you may want to create.

With the advent of the DFS/ECS service points, now any consumer can easily access the Documentum repository as long as it understands web services. And developers can now compose distributed applications easily using ECS as a component.

The DFS Software Development Kit (SDK) is a set of tools included in the DFS for creation of custom services as well as consumers of services (both ECS and custom). The SDK hands the developer the real power, above and beyond the former WSF possibilities. Developers can now easily generate new services from regular Java code and these services can easily utilize the ECS.

A Real World Example

Suppose that you are building a Loan Management application which deals with several documents for each account. For example, a loan account may be associated with an application, a photo ID, and a proof of income. This application can become a consumer for the ECS to store these documents in a Documentum repository and access them as needed.