There are a number of blogs out there that talk about the EMC products that integrate SharePoint 2010 with Documentum along with the pros and cons of each product. However, I found the task of locating authoritative references to be infinitely more challenging. Because finding official documentation was so difficult, I thought it was worth a blog in hopes my work would save others that effort!

EMC currently offers two products and one services option for SharePoint 2010 and Documentum integration. The products are “EMC My Documentum for Microsoft SharePoint” (MyDSP) and “EMC Documentum Repository Services for Microsoft SharePoint” (EDRSMS). The SharePoint Documentum Framework (SDF) is available as part of an EMC Professional Services engagement.

There is an interoperability overview presentation from Q1 2010 covering the two products that you can view or download:

SharePoint_Interop_Overview-q1_2010.pdf

I have seen SDF described as providing Software Development Kits, support for calling Documentum Foundation Services (DFS) from SharePoint, support for DFS Extensions, and support for workflow. For an example of how SDF has been used, take a look at the SharePoint xCP xCelerator built by the EMC IIG professional services to provide “users in SharePoint to access an xCP application in the form of a Documentum Inbox.”

Ok, so you have all the references above that describe the products and some information about SDF.

In my project I want to use SharePoint as the user interface and Documentum as the repository. From the above link you see that the EDRSMS product does this pretty well. But there are two problems I find with the product.

• SharePoint only surfaces content in Documentum that was loaded through SharePoint
• ECM is planning to drop support for EDRSMS (per our EMC partner rep)

Some may consider the need for another SQL Server (or database) as a problem, but if it meets my needs I don’t really care.

MyDSP is a neat interface to Documentum, but our EMC partner rep indicates that this product will be dropped from the EMC lineup in the next year. Personally, I like to use products that I know will be around a while. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like these two products fit in that category.

So what about SDF? According to our partner rep, SDF may be productized concurrent with the discontinuing of support for MyDSP. I’m not sure what a productized SDF will look like – hopefully it will provide a seemless interface that EDRSMS provides with the ability of viewing all the Documentum content that MyDSP provides. What SDF currently provides (mentioned above) doesn’t sound like seemless integration, but hopefully the productized version will be all that SharePoint users and developers could hope for!