D2 is EMC’s latest UI offering for Documentum. Positioned as a highly configurable but not customizable interface, D2 is meant to exist alongside the usual webtop, taskspace, and the other web based interfaces. I have gotten a chance to have a look at this latest offering, and it certainly lives up to its advertised configurability. Just about everything users tend to want configured in the normal wdk/data dictionary paradigm can be done in the D2 configuration interface. Additionally, having all of the configurations in one area makes it alot easier to keep track of the configurations made. The configuration can also be exported and reimported with just a few mouse clicks.

For those that heavily use virtual documents, D2 makes creating virtual documents a snap. Virtual documents are easily created via an intuitive drag and drop interface, not the clunky and sluggish menu driven interface. In general, the D2 interface is much more responsive than any of the wdk based interfaces.

This then brings us to some D2 architecture specifics. D2, from what I can tell, is not your typical wdk/web based application. I am not yet sure exactly all of the technologies used, but so far, it appears to be an msxml based application using activex/java components. Unfortunately, this means Windows/IE only for real; no getting by sort-of with another browser. D2 communicates primarily via dfs, which is sort of unfortunate, considering how verbose and complicated dfs is; although, depending on the implementation, using dfs might have made it easier to abstract the data layer, and hence the ability to replace the communications layer in the future, than had it been done with dfc and native dfc objects.

As for the notion that D2 cannot be customized, I don’t really see why this is. I am sure some enterprising developer familiar with the underlying technologies can easily customize this application. It’s not like the current wdk based applications are really customizable anyway; anyone who has tried has surely discovered that the wdk component classes are nearly impossible to extend properly; with all of the private methods and attributes, you end up having to decompile and rewrite those classes most of the time anyway. This same technique could be applied to D2 as well.

With EMC’s stance that D2 is meant to coexist along side webtop and other wdk based applications, it would appear that D2 is not meant to play a prominent role in the Documentum UI lineup. However, everyone knows by now that wdk is eventually going to be retired, and the only ‘new’ UI will be the newest Taskspace, as part of xCP 2.0. Could D2 eventually become the one shoe fits all for the content management side of Documentum? I don’t see why not; as far as I can tell, the only thing it is really missing is official customization ‘support’.

Ian Chu

Advertisement