Thursday 22 May 2008

EMC's Documentum and eRoom gets a 2.0 make over with "Magellan"

For those of us that live and breath large enterprise computing AND have an interest in Enterprise Web 2.0, this is interesting - EMC's Documentum and eRoom are already widely deployed enterprise content and collaboration tools and their new proposed client platform, Magellan, could provide an alternative to Microsoft SharePoint (for collaboration) and IBM's Connections/Quickr. From the end-user perspective, Magellan will provide Web 2.0 collaboration features, such as Wikis, blogs, RSS, and tagging:

"Magellan shows a much needed change in the thinking at Documentum. One size, no longer fits all. Previous iterations of Documentum web UI’s have always started with a full featured application and then grayed out to limit features a user would not use. But what was forgotten was all these gray menu options were really a lot of clutter making the product look complex. Magellan finally changes this and creates a UI for casual users. That’s right power users have Webtop and casual users will have their own.

The user interface is clean with simple document lists to show content within a directory with only a handful of attributes presented (but these can be customized). Gone are the list of menu options that make the Webtop UI look like the old Workspace Windows client. But the system also presents Web 2.0 functionality in that a second window shows discussions on the project or individual document.

Better still the UI is not only clean but sexy. Learning from the best in UI, Magellan adds interfaces introduced by Apple for iTunes and iPod. In addition to standard thumbnail directory views, Magellan offers a browse option similar to Cover Flow. While search adds a filtering option similar to that in iTunes for finding a song based on a genre and artist."

I must admit, I never thought I would hear EMC's interfaces being described as "sexy" or inspired by Apple ;-)

Also see this post and a couple of YouTube videos from EMC World 2008.

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