April 2001

e.docs

Documentum Brings Content to Portals

by Lowell Rapaport

Enterprise information portals put nearly all important business activities at users' fingertips (or at least just one or two clicks away). Users can log onto a portal and instantly receive updates on projects they are party to and gain access to important company information. They can open and run applications, effectively making the Web browser their sole interface to the electronic enterprise. Portals can also be tailored to individual users, so information pushed out is focused on what each user needs to know.

Enter the Documentum 4i Portal Content Management Edition, from Documentum, Pleasanton, CA. First available in January, this offering brings Documentum's content management prowess to the increasingly popular portal environment, providing collaborative tools that support business processes and enrich access to valuable corporate information.

The collaborative portion of Documentum's Portal Content Management Edition offers tools such as online discussion threads with real-time chat (similar to the instant messenger software that has become so popular with consumers), newsgroup-style bulletin boards; multiple project views; and virtual meetings. The tool set also includes "deliverables management," a system that makes sure the results of an online project can be pushed to all members of a team. The system can also distribute the results to other project teams and business processes within an enterprise.

Documentum 4i Portal Edition Documentum Pleasanton, CA, 925-600-6800 www.documentum.com Description: Provides portals with seamless integration of content management and collaboration services. Comment: Documentum's combination of content management and collaborative services gives portal users a robust suite of features not found in many products. A natural for enterprises using Documentum's content management. Pricing: $100,000 for 20 users; $175,000 for 50 users; $225,000 for 100 users. ProductInfo 911

Collaboration extends beyond project management into the realm of knowledge management. Supervisors can assign or call up pre-existing personnel attributes, such as areas of business, management and technical expertise. These attributes are universally available to anyone who can reach the Documentum system, even if it is only through the portal. Management can then monitor the performance of project team members so that when a project concludes, workers can be intelligently assigned to new projects.

The combination of universal user attributes and deliverables management ensures that projects cross-pollinate and that the enterprise fully capitalizes on its collective institutional knowledge and talent pool.

The enterprise information portal (EIP) side of Documentum's latest offering is all about integrating corporate data sources within a universal Web interface. This can be achieved with a toolkit supplied by Documentum or with the company's eConnectors to popular portal systems from Plumtree and Epicentric.

"Developers can use the toolkit to create simpler portals for businesses that don't have to pull a lot of data sources together," explains Whitney Tidmarsh, Documentum's vice president of sales and marketing.

"Enterprises with more demanding needs can integrate with third-party portal software."

The Portal Edition exposes Documentum's content management services to the portal so it can combine Internet activities (such as email, newsfeeds and business-to-business e-commerce) with functions normally found only in content management systems (such as workflow, document libraries, content contribution and version management). Of particular interest is content contribution, which lets users add content to the system through the Portal Edition interface. Version management lets users check documents in and out of the system and preserves earlier versions of a document as changes are made.

Integration with portal software gives Documentum a portal interface for its enterprise content management. The combination is good for both Documentum and its customers, according to Andrew Warzecha, an analyst with Meta Group (www.metagroup.com), Stamford, CT.

"Other content management vendors don't have the breadth of capabilities Documentum has," says Warzecha. "This will allow Documentum to compete with new [faces] in the content management space and will give Documentum's customers a single source for content management, and portal and Web delivery of content."

Two types of customers are expected to be interested in the Portal Edition. One type is the established Documentum customer looking to create a portal that will access an existing content management system. The other type of customer will be looking to install a complete system all at once. Health Net (www.health.net), Woodland Hills, CA, fell into the latter category.

Formerly known as Foundation Health Systems, Health Net is one of the nation's largest publicly traded managed health care companies. It comprises HMO networks on the East and West coasts and in the Southwest. The company has grown primarily through acquisitions, and a portal was seen as a way to improve communication. Initial deployment of Health Net's portal should be complete as this issue goes to press.

"We were looking for ways to provide connectivity for all applications and to provide information to our associates [employees]," says Jack Godsill, Health Net's vice president of strategic information technology planning. "We also wanted to provide a single, unified online working environment for all associates."

Like a lot of companies that are formed through mergers and acquisition, Health Net had a wide variety of systems, including IBM AS/400 and S/390 mainframes, DEC computers running VMS, and Unix and Windows workstations. Some of the acquired entities had document management systems, but there was no companywide content management system. Collaboration and workflow was ad hoc and was supported primarily via email.

At first, Health Net was interested in the Web content management features of Portal Edition. "For us, the key differentiator for Documentum was the capability to let users take control of the Web publishing process," says Godsill. Before installing Documentum's solution, users had to submit their content to a webmaster for it to be posted to the Internet.

The Portal Edition's collaboration tools proved valuable for the company. Health Net wanted its associates - all 11,000 of them - to be able to log onto "My Home Page," where they could get internal news and official company information, messages from the CEO, email, external news feeds and collaboration services. The services would include automatic reporting and notification and the ability to manage projects with team members across the country.

"We want associates to share knowledge," says Godsill. "The ability to bring in associates from operations across the country in an organization as geographically diverse as ours is a plus."

Health Net, a nationwide HMO, is using Documentum's Portal Edition in combination with the available toolkit to build an intracompany portal.