Documentum unveils portal platform

Following its recent strategy refocus towards Web applications and platforms, Documentum today unveiled Documentum 4i, a platform for helping organizations manage and integrate business knowledge, processes and content within and beyond their enterprise.

Documentum 4i, a platform designed for true "business portal" usage, becomes available this month.

Portals currently available like My Yahoo provide "a personalized view of information, but not in a business problem context," said Whitney Martin, director of platform marketing. 4i, available later this month, will provide the "application-aware" platform -- one part of Documentum's revised strategy -- to build applications, the other part of that strategy.

More specifically, 4i is geared at some of the misconceptions created by the Web. Put eloquently by Matt Shanahan, Documentum VP of platform marketing, "instead of harnessing the Internet, businesses have been harnessed by the Internet" -- workers content-hunting across numerous Web and file servers, filtering through thousands of search hits, and using redundant or stale content.

4i serves as the Web application platform that links content (what kind exists? where is it at?), business processes (who does what? what do we do at the end?) and people (who is assigned to what? who has which role?), said Shanahan.

The platform also is designed to offer tools for developing and configuring corporate portals, for example a marketing portal or a project portal "that reflect dynamic roles, content and processes," said Shanahan. The platform also houses a large repository for storing content and knowledge.

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