Its taken a while but I did say after the event in Lisbon that I would put together some advice for people who are currently skilled in IIG products which will enable them to prepare for the future. In Lisbon a number of major announcements were made on the IIG products which will start to change the products in the next few years, no timescales were given. Some of these changes were:
- the move to the Next Generation Information Server(NGIS) and away fro the Content Server;
- the move away from WDK and towards RCMP for all web clients;
- more cloud enablement of the product stack;
- the introduction of XPlore (technical not announced in Lisbon but the timing of its introduction lets me put it in here!);
So if I was advising a Documentum developer on what to learn what would I advise them to do, in no particular order:
- learn XPlore, depending on what exposure you have to the search components of Documentum most people will need to know the basics of XPlore;
- download, install and try things in Centerstage. Why? Its the first client based on RCMP and if you can start to master development on this platform now you will be well placed when the new clients, such as xCP 2.0, come out. I’d recommend trying with all the facets of it including adding Widgets which could provide integration points with other systems;
- download, install and start to learn xDB. It may take some time for NGIS to be delivered but it will be based on xDB as the database. Learning it now will put you ahead of the game, I would look at starting to build some apps which use the engine for management of structured data which you currently find you need to model in your current Documentum based apps e.g. the POLE model (Person, Object, Location and Event);
- try out the CMIS connectors, a slightly different approach but try different methods of using the CMIS connectors on Documentum. Think of some scenarios where this may be required, e.g. an ERP system which requires to pull documents from multiple content repositories. Try it with multiple Documentum repositories and then throw in a alternative such as Alfresco or SharePoint 2010.
These are just some ideas and they may not get you ahead in the world today, but in the future you’ll be in a strong position.
