Momentum16 – Day 2 – C6, Load Testing and REST API

So today is the second day of the Momentum 16 in Barcelona and as expected, this day contained many more technical presentations and discussions than the first day. I attended several interesting presentations and hackathon/hands on sessions as well so I haven’t really had time to rest today.

So first thing in the morning, I started with a two hours hackathon session related to how it is possible to augment Documentum reliability and performance. This hackathon was lead by Henrik Rexed from Neotys. This company is actually providing Neoload, which is a load and performance testing tool that realistically simulates user activity and monitors infrastructure behavior so you can eliminate bottlenecks in all your web and mobile applications. This Load Test solution isn’t related to Documentum so you can actually Load Test everything but they do have some experience with Documentum which makes it even better. In this session, Henrik presented us the methodology that should be used to load test and monitor each and every application starting during the project phase with Unit Testing and Unit Load to ends up with complete SLA verifications by Load Testing the whole application. One thing that it is important to note and remember is that Load Testing each and every component one by one is good but that’s not enough. Sometimes, your system will break only when all components are solicited all together and that’s what you should test in the end!

After that, I attended a session presented by Mirko Weller (Volkswagen) and Christian Meier (fme) related to how 60k users are accessing the Documentum Platform at Volkswagen. This wasn’t actually a technical presentation but I wanted to follow it because we, at dbi services, are also managing a similar Documentum Platform at one of our customers with so many users and environments/instances that I thought it would be good to compare a little bit with what others are doing and to exchange feelings and ideas about how to improve our Platform.

Finally at the end of the morning, I attended a session about how to provide the right interface to your users at the right time. Boris Carbonneill (C6) and Hugo Simon-Chautemps (Sanofi) presented us the “C6 Mobile” application, the “C6 Office” interface as well as their “any” solution. The purpose of these three products is to help your users accessing their documents whenever they want with the best possible user’s experience. I actually found these applications/UIs quite good. There is a good balance in the sizing, colors, features displayed, aso…

• The C6 Mobile application can be used to access documents while traveling directly using your phone and it can be used to quickly review/approve your tasks.
• The C6 Office is actually an add-in for Microsoft Office, PowerPoint and Excel that lets you create/update documents based on templates defined in D2 and rules/permissions/acls defined in D2-Config without having to launch an internet browser. What you have to do is just to start Office, connect to the repository and work directly inside Microsoft’s application. For the moment it is apparently not working for Outlook. Maybe a future version?
• The any solution can be used in the Cloud to merge all kind of repositories coming from Documentum, SharePoint, OpenText (and more) and store all that in one place. This solution actually makes me thing to InfoArchive which is providing similar thing and some other/different features… You can synchronize documents from D2 to the Cloud to share them with external people for example or just do that so that you will have a duplicate copy in case it is needed (E.g.: copying IQs/OQs/DR/IT stuff to the Cloud might be a good idea in case there is a Disaster and your DMS isn’t there anymore, then you would still have enough to actually execute and document your Disaster Recovery!)

Beginning of the afternoon, I followed another two hours hackathon on the following subject: Developing Custom Applications with Documentum APIs. I’m not a Documentum developer but I wanted to do this hackathon so I can learn some stuff related to the Documentum REST API and it was a good session. There were three different levels for this hackathon: beginner, intermediate and advanced. I choose the intermediate one and I had to build an application using Angular and the Documentum REST API. That was actually pretty funny and I was able to play with the APIs calls, aso… Really cool.

This concludes the summary of the second day. See you tomorrow for the third and last one!