Momentum16 – Day 1 – InfoArchive first approach

As Gérard explained in its first blog today was the first day not specific to the partners. I had the opportunity to attend some business centric (not really) interesting sessions in the morning. Then the morning ended and the afternoon begun with two keynotes: “Dell EMC Opening Keynote” and “Digital Transformation Keynote”. Finally I was able to attend a hands on session on InfoArchive and that’s what I will talk about in this blog since that’s the only piece of technical information I was able to get today.

Like every other events, there are exhibitions and exhibitors that are showing what they are doing around EMC in their booths. Of course there is also a booth regarding the InfoArchive solution if you want to talk to some EMC experts and I think that’s a pretty good way to see and understand what this solution is doing.

EMC InfoArchive is a unified enterprise archiving platform that stores related structured data and unstructured content in a single consolidated repository. This product enables corporations to preserve the value of enterprise information in a single, compliant, and easily accessible unified archive. Basically, that’s a place where you can store your content to be archived on a low price storage because this kind of information is usually kept only for legal constraints (read only) and don’t need to be accessed very often.

InfoArchive is composed of three components: an included Web Server, a Server (core of the application) and finally a Database (it is using an Xhive Database (XML), just like xPlore). Therefore you can very easily provide an XML file that will be used as an import file and that contains content to be archived by InfoArchive. Basically everything that can be transformed to an XML format (metadata/content) can be put inside InfoArchive. This solution provides some default connectors like:

• Documentum
• SharePoint (can archive documents and/or complete sites)
• SAP
• …

These default connectors are great but if that’s not enough, then you can just define your own with the information that you want to store and how you want to index them, transform them, aso… And of course this is defined in XML files. At the moment, this configuration can be a little bit scary since it is all done manually but I heard that a GUI configuration might be coming soon if it’s not in the version 4.2 already? InfoArchive is apparently fully web-based and  therefore based on a discussion I had with an EMC colleague, it should technically be possible to archive all the content of an SharePoint Site for example and then accessing this content from Documentum or any other location as long as it is using web-based requests to query the InfoArchive.

During the hands on session (first time working with InfoArchive for me), I had to create a new application/holding that can be used to archive Tweets. At the end of the one and a half hour, I had successfully created my application and I was able to search for Tweets based on their creationDate, userName, hashTags, retweetCount, aso… That was done actually pretty easily by following the help guide provided by EMC (specific to this use case) but if you don’t have this help guide, you better be an InfoArchive expert because you need to know each and every one of the XML tags that need to be added and where to add them to get something working properly.

See you tomorrow for the next blog with hopefully more technical stuff to share.