Documentum streamlines multichannel publishing

Companies that may be wasting time and money because of a lack of integration between print and digital publishing may find some relief with a new product introduced this week by content management specialist Documentum.

Documentum is expanding its content management product to enable companies to create content once and then publish it in a variety of formats, including print and online environments such as Web sites and portals. Called the Enterprise Publishing Solution, the new product integrates Documentum’s existing content management capabilities to enable collaboration and streamline workflow regardless of what form the content is initially created in.

Today, most companies store rich media in a digital asset management system, Web content in a Web content management system and documents and XML-based content in a document management system, all of which function separately from one another.

“Because you’ve got multiple departmental systems for all these different distribution channels it’s really hard to share content. There’s no overlying business process that allows you to get content out to multiple channels in an integrated fashion,” says Mark Arbour, director of product marketing at Documentum. “There is no single workflow engine that allows you to move content throughout the entire creation process.”

As a result, companies may be losing valuable time and money because content has to be created multiple times for multiple different formats and content is often not reused or shared, Arbour says.

Documentum’s Enterprise Publishing Solution addresses those problems by integrating multiple content management products, including the Documentum Digital Asset Manager and Web Publisher, as well as the Documentum eRoom Enterprise, which enables collaboration across the different content types, Arbour says. In addition, content is automatically tagged and classified so that content can be retrieved and reused.

The glue holding it all together is a new product called Documentum Authoring Integration Services, which is a set of server technologies that makes it easy for users to hook into the Documentum repository, Arbour says.

“For example, one of the features is it lets Documentum look like a network drive. So if you’re using Quark or PhotoShop or one of those popular authoring tools, you can save and access, import and export content in and out of our global repository just like you would if it were a hard drive,” Arbour says.

Authoring Integration Services is expected to ship this quarter. It will be the final piece needed to make the Documentum 5.2 enterprise content management platform an enterprise publishing product, Arbour says. Pricing for the platform starts at about $150,000 for 100 users.