Documentum 4 Dummies

It has been a while since I posted anything new. I have been on a self imposed semi-hiatus these past several months concentrating on work, vacation, and attending EMC World 2008. Ah don’t you just love Las Vegas?

While I have been away I have been working on my research and a virtualization white paper that I hope to have published soon. In between I have been playing with a lot of software and recently Siva at Sivlabs asked me to take a look at his baby SivDM - Documentum Manager.

SivDM is one of those tools that anyone who is doing serious administration or for the novice who needs to get to just about anything from a Documentum repository can appreciate. Its simple user interface is direct and straight forward.

The only prerequisite to run the program is you must have Java and a copy of the Documentum DFC installed on the computer you have configured to connect to your repository (docbase).

Installation is easy. Just download the compressed zip file and extract it to where ever you like. Click on the SivDM.exe to run. You will be prompted with a login screen and once your credentials have been validated you are connected to your repository.

From the command line interface you can type direct DQL statements or use one of the pull down menu’s to get at a host of commands built in. So if your trying to reverse engineer a repository. Look at the existing objects structure or see how many connected sessions you have open it is all at your finger tips.

The included documentation in PDF format is well organized and straight forward. This is one tool I would highly recommend. It is open source and free and that is the best kind. Great job Siva and I look forward to keep this little program handy.

It came to my attention a couple weeks ago that there were some broken links on the D4D site. Being the busy person I put this on my to do list and promptly forgot. My Bad! Sorry to all for the inconvenience.

The problem with the broken link started a couple months ago when the D4D site was moved off Yahoo.com web hosting and over on to BlueHost. I thought I had fixed all of them but as Murphy would have it my efforts were for not!.

Again I apologize and I promise I will do a better job of tracking changes.

About comments

When I starting trying to fix some of the broken links I noted there were several comments that had not been posted. Sorry to those who posted. The way the system administration is setup on D4D is every comment must be approved by the administrator. This reduces the spam and mischief attacks the blog has seen in the past.

Call for Administration

I have made the plea before. The D4D site needs help with administration, writing new posts and keeping track of the latest and greatest with Documentum. If you would like to directly contribute to the D4D and make it a better site for all, leave me a comment or drop a note through the contacts page. I could sure use the help!

Lastly if you see a problem with the site like a broke link, spelling or grammar errors please drop me a note.

Thanks to all the readers and have a good week!

Recently I received a note from Laurence Hart at the Word of Pie regarding the proper use of copyright and using a post from the D4D site without recognition. To make matters worse the post was propagated to yet another web address that also did not check the copyright validity.

It may be that the offending site did not understand what copyright means or I clearly did not stipulate proper use. So I went back to my Terms of Use page and it is clearly indicated there! And I quote;

Section 2. Use of Content

The Service contains information, photographs, images, graphics, links, and other material (collectively, the “Content”) that are protected by copyright, trademark or other proprietary rights of D4d2.com or third parties. All Content on the Service is copyrighted as a collected work of D4D2.com, pursuant to applicable copyright law. Users of the Service may use the Content only for their personal, noncommercial use.

All trademarks and copyrights presented on the Service inure to their respective owners.

User may not modify, publish, distribute, transmit, transfer or sell, reproduce, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, display, or in any other way exploit the Content, in whole or in part, except as expressly permitted in this Agreement.

And here is the key section!

User may download, copy, or print the Content only for user’s own personal use, provided that user maintains all copyright and other notices contained in such Content. Except as expressly permitted by the copyright laws, no copying, storage, redistribution, or publication of any Content is permitted without the express written permission of D4D2.com and or Troy Martin.

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On January 18th I posted an update about more tools. Scott Roth of Flatirons wrote “I have played with a previous version of Delilah and found it preferable to Samson.  It looks and sounds like it is even better now.  The drawback is that it requires dmclvb40.dll so you will need to install the Desktop Client before I can try it out.”

Well I have some good news for Scott and Documentum community. Over the weekend I received a message from Rob de Leeuw, the Author of Delilah.

Rob writes “After reading your January 18th article were Scott writes about the drawback for Delilah is to require DMCLVB40.dll, I have rewritten Delilah to directly access the DMCL40.dll.

As of today, the Delilah 2008RC2 version can be downloaded and it only requires the DMCL40.dll from Documentum.

You can get your copy of the new version of Delilah at http://www.canservices.nl

Thanks Rob for your update, I am sure everyone will benefit from the not having to install the Desktop client and can directly use Delilah with the minimum of effort.

OK how many of you think Documentum is the best ECM/CMS application available? Over the past 10 years open source applications have become more and more popular. The reason mainly is they are free!

Does open source applications provide the same level service and support like Documentum? I think it is safe to say yes. When you peel back the covers of Documentum you will notice a customized version of Tomcat that is included. This embedded version is Documentum’s method server. This version is highly customized just for Documentum and will not work like the version you run as your web server.

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Recently I upgraded D4D to the latest version of WordPress along with moving the site to a new hosting service. This was necessary to take advantage of the latest security features.

Well this effort was not without some growing pains. Some readers have noted issues with the subscriber login and some other miscellaneous technical glitches.

Sorry for the inconvenience.  I updated the subscriber plug-in and the issues seem to be resolved for the moment.  If you are having trouble logging in or want to make a comment, you can always drop me an email at troy@geekystreet.com.

I try to check my email frequently and normally will respond within 24 hours of your request.

OK now to tools. We all need tools to help us get our jobs done. We all have our little bag of tricks and scripts that we have written through out the years to make our lives a little bit easier. I received an email from Scott Roth over at Flatirons Solutions. As you might remember Scott was our winner last year in our little contest.

Scott writes “I have played with a previous version of Delilah and found it preferable to Samson.  It looks and sounds like it is even better now.  The drawback is that it requires dmclvb40.dll so you will need to install the Desktop Client before I can try it out.  The other utility, TadsBits, is very interesting for several reasons:  first, I wrote a Desktop Client 4i plug in some years back that looked and functioned very similar to Tadsbits; second, I was hoping someone had a better solution than dump/load.  I will try this one out too since I am facing a migration from 4i/Win/SQL to 5.3/Unix/Oracle in the next few months.

Since we are on the topic of tools and utilities, here is another two I find interesting and useful:

• Documentum Command Shell (DOCS) is a command line client interface for the Documentum Content Server, which provides navigation, execution of basic library functions, and an extensible architecture for writing additional custom commands.  http://sourceforge.net/projects/dctmcmd. I confess partiality for this tool because it is my project.

• Dctmutils – as set of programmer utilities. Too much to summaries here; check the site:  http://dctmutils.org/”

So you might check them out, as these too look interesting.

Got a tip or favorite tools? Drop us a note and we will add them to the list. When I have a little more time I will consolidate them into their own page.
Have a good week!

Migrating docbase repositories from one location to another can be a daunting task! I know as I spent a good portion of 2007 supporting projects moving docbase’s. This is not the first time I have supported this effort. I have spent countless hours reverse engineering Documentum installations so to understand how they were created in the first place. This task is not pleasant also.

As a Documentum Infrastructure/Applications Architect I am always looking for good tools to my my job a little bit easier and applies to my motto Keep it Simple! Well one of my colleagues found such a site today and alerted me.

I have not personally tried either of these two solutions so I can’t recommend them. But they do look interesting and worth a look. I plan on tearing them apart soon and will report back on my findings. Click the jump below to get your copy.

• The first tool is: Tadsbits
• The second tool is: Delilah by CanServices

If anyone has used these tools please do leave us a comment and give your opinion.

Welcome to Documentum 4 Dummies 2008. If you are a returning subscriber you will notice the Documentum 4 Dummies has a new look and much better structure.

Over the holiday’s we moved the D4D site from Yahoo to Bluehost. The purpose of the move/migration was to reduce yearly hosting fee’s as well as allow us to upgrade the WordPress software to the latest release and take advantage of new features as well as the latest security updates.

Spam is still a big, big issue and that is why we require all users who wish to post comments have a valid user account. All comment traffic is filtered and must be approved by the administrator before it is posted to the site. I understand some peoples frustration as to not being able to post directly and have to wait for the admin to be notified before approval.

OK that was the good news. Now for the bad… During the move we encountered errors in exporting the users list. This along with a bunch of other issues that forced us to relocate the D4D to a new host. As well we have noticed issues around and concerning RSS feeds and trackbacks. If you were a registered user before the site was moved, you will have to recreate your account to post new comments, as your old login will no longer work. Again sorry for the inconvenience and we apologize.

We hope you like the new look and any suggestions to how to make the site better is appreciated.

Again welcome back and Happy New Year,

The Geeky Artist

The D4D site has seen a flurry of activity over the past couple weeks as we come down to the end of the contest. Many new registered users voicing their vote for the most popular entry. Clearly if I was to choose base on this activity the top choice would be Scott Roth’s Seven Jobs Every Documentum Developer Should Know and Use.

Less we not forget Pawan Kumar’s book Documentum Content Management Foundations. Covering a host of subjects to prepare you for the EMC Proven Professional Certification Exam.

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