Content Management Systems Reviews - Documentum - CenterStage

In my last post on Documentum, I described one of its collaboration products - eRoom. In today's post, I am going to describe another collaboration product of Documentum - CenterStage.

CenterStage delivers the benefits of enterprise content management, advanced search, and collaboration tools on a single architecture.

It allows to:

• manage and visually organize project, team, and corporate work information; 
• launch projects with space and content templates; 
• work with team members on documents in public and private workspaces; 
• find information wherever it resides; 
• gain access to this information from anywhere.

Public or team workspaces where contributors can share and exchange ideas and activities. There is cross-project visibility and awareness for easy project management of simultaneous projects. Users can establish roles and permissions for their team members, set workspace and content policies, and use templates to ensure best practices.

The CenterStage community model brings people and content together with similar interests or objectives. A community member can become aware of many contributors and their activities across different workspaces.

CenterStage provides wide range of collaboration tools: wiki, blogs, inline authoring, discussion threads, tagging, ratings. These tools allow “collaboration with context” – the ability to see inter-related items and information in one view.

Standalone tables

CenterStage provides standalone data tables to facilitate the management of content collections. A structured arrangement of related content organized into fields, columns, and data tables provide a way for teams to manage such information as list of planned projects, contact information, action items, etc. Data tables organize information into a series of related entries making them a useful way to manage such simple items as to-do lists or more complex items as inventory tracking data. With standalone data tables, information is easy to manage, track, and update.

Search and discovery

CenterStage includes advanced search feature. Users can search with one query an unlimited number of information repositories such as SharePoint, file shares, email archives, ERP systems, ECM systems. The results are filtered, merged, and organized into logical groupings so that users can navigate to the most relevant search results.

The search and discovery features are further enhances by different viewing capabilities, providing the ability to determine contents of any file or folder without opening it. In addition to the regular thumbnail view, users can hover their mouse over any file to display its metadata or employ the slides view to grasp the actual content of any file. Search and discovery enables rapid access to the most relevant content by extracting metadata such as company name, place, and topic, and then dynamically filtering the results.

Governance, risk, and compliance

Documentum Content Server is the back end to the CenterStage solution and addresses the need to ensure that all information is compliant with regulations, legal stipulations, and best practices. The content server provides a rich set of content management services and a comprehensive infrastructure for all content applications, so implementation and administration is simplified. It also provides the scalability, robust functionality, and service orientation for global enterprise deployments.

With the content server, companies can store and manage all types of content including HTML and XML, graphics, multimedia, and traditional documents created with desktop applications. All content can be safely managed and archived. There is full audit at all stages of content creation, approval, and use while enforcing information retention and disposal. This in turn ensures optimum network performance by eliminating isolated pockets of data and content stranded across the enterprise.

Other benefits

Branch office caching services – provides quick access to any type of content regardless of bandwidth constraints or network latency.

Content storage services – allocate content across storage tiers based on its changing value and access requirements.

Media transformation services – transform and manage content such as images, video, and other rich media.

Information rights management – secure information no matter where it travels to maintain control over that information.

Transactional content management – accelerate business processes such as invoice processing or case management.

Web content management – manage the content, underlying structure, and publishing process for web sites and portals.

CenterStage Key Features

Team and community workspace	Wiki, blogs, discussion forums, tagging, RSS feeds
Organization of structured content	Standalone data tables to manage content collections
Workspace and page templates	Lifecycles
Component-based UI and composition model	Advanced search and discovery
Policy-based configuration	Federated Search
Access control	Guided navigation
Lifecycles	Content analytics