Integrating SharePoint and Documentum through MirrorNG

Posted by Stijn Van Vreckem on Feb 05, 2010

The demand for migrations to Microsoft SharePoint continues to grow, as the platform rapidly becomes the standard for organizations seeking a centralized knowledge repository and collaborative workspace.

I'm happy to announce that we've integrated SharePoint in MirrorNG (the content integration product for XAOP). We will offer support for Microsoft SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 in the coming months. We are also looking at integration with CMIS.
I'm excited about the options SharePoint and CMIS will give us architecturally speaking.

Screenshot of our SharePoint MirrorNG test environment.

Whether it will be

• migrating between SharePoint sites and Documentum repositories,
• upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to 2010,
• reorganizing your SharePoint content,
• archiving from SharePoint sites to EMC Documentum repositories,
• synchronization of content, metadata and security between Documentum and SharePoint.

Differences between SharePoint and Documentum are, among others:

• Documentum supports branching whereas SharePoint only supports linear version trees.
• In Documentum, a document or folder can be linked in multiple places. In SharePoint, a document that really belongs in two or more places must either be placed in one of them or be duplicated in all of them. The former choice will make the document harder to find, the latter choice means that the different versions must be kept in sync. For example, in a company with multiple departments where each department has its own site, a document is published that applies to two or more of these departments. So either it is published only on the site of one of the departments and the people of the other department will have to look for it there, or it is duplicated on each department’s site and will have to be kept in sync.
• Documentum supports virtual documents and thus allows composing larger documents of many smaller ones. This promotes reuse and allows several people to collaborate on a large document as long as they each work on a separate part of it. SharePoint has no such concept.
• SharePoint has the concept of content types that are linked to lists whereas Documentum has document types that are not limited by the document’s location.
• User and group management in Documentum is global whereas in SharePoint it is site-specific.
• Access management reuse in SharePoint is site or list based, whereas in Documentum it is ACL based. A manageable security setup in SharePoint has to include site/list design; in Documentum security design can be independent from the location and still be manageable.

Note that we have a deep knowledge of Documentum and we have limited experience with the intricacies of SharePoint, so we may be wrong about some of these items and wouldn’t mind being corrected.

It looks like SharePoint is conceptually simpler in many places and more complex in others than Documentum. Needless to say, any content exchange between a Documentum and a SharePoint system will involve a great deal of mapping effort to compensate for the mismatch in concepts in both systems rather than any technical difficulties of actually copying the documents between systems.