A few years ago (feels like ages now) I dove head first into the EMC Documentum space and was overwhelmed in spite of the significant enterprise technology experience I had under my belt. A simple Documentum deployment involves about five components and there are over 50 products available today in the EMC Documentum suite, not counting the third-party products that have mushroomed around the platform.

I wondered if there was any documentation that would enable me to wrap my arms around this challenge. Indeed, there was documentation way more than what I was ready to handle as a beginner. I needed something, maybe a book, to get me started in one place and then help me navigate the documentation as a reference by ordering things in an effective fashion.

I am glad to finally see some books on Documentum making it to the market. Web Content Management with Documentum by Gaurav Kathuria guides readers in setting up and configuring Documentum for a Web Content Management solution. It also provides an overview of the platform essentials. A Beginner’s Guide to Developing Documentum Desktop Applications by M. Scott Roth guides readers in desktop application development for Documentum.

When EMC announced the addition of Documentum exams to their Proven Professional certification program, I was excited to see an opportunity to make a contribution. I value certification exams for one benefit above any other rapid learning. Preparation for these exams exposes the candidate to the breadth and depth of the subject in a short period. Test preparation, when done right, can stimulate rapid growth in knowledge. I consider practice questions and tests to be the best mechanism for identifying gaps in knowledge and, thus, guiding the study effort for maximum effect.

In this book, I share this approach and provide over 250 practice questions to nudge the reader in the directions that would help them the most. I also hope that this book will prove to be a gentle introduction to the breadth of the core Documentum platform and will facilitate entry of technology professionals into the Documentum community.

Pawan Kumar

Introduction

EMC Documentum is the leading enterprise content management (ECM) platform globally. EMC Proven Professional certification is an exam-based certification program, which introduced a new EMC Proven Content Management Application Developer (EMCAD) track in early 2007. The first exam in this track is Content Management Foundations Associate-level Exam, whose exam code is E20-120.

This book is a complete study guide and includes study material and practice questions to prepare for this exam. Even though this book focuses on certification preparation, it strives to serve Documentum beginners and practitioners irrespective of their interest in the certification exam. It can also serve as a handy guide and quick reference to the technical fundamentals that is fully up to date for Documentum 5.3. Beginners are introduced to concepts in a logical manner while practitioners can use it as a reference to jump to relevant concepts directly.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

Content management is a rapidly growing discipline today as new technologies attempt to bring the same rigor to managing unstructured content (documents, for example) that databases brought to structured data decades ago. Content management includes various aspects of creating, manipulating, and accessing content including lifecycle and business process automation.

Content lifecycle helps move content through various states, often starting with creation and ending with expiration and archiving. Automating content-centric business processes can bring efficiency to operations and can create a searchable record of events, actions, and performers involved in these processes.

ECM takes these content management aspects to enterprise scales (large number of users, high availability, distributed deployments, high performance, etc.) and enables integration with other systems, which can act as sources or consumers of managed content.

While ECM refers to management of electronic documents in general, several specialized forms of content management have evolved to meet specific needs in more effective ways:

Each of these different forms of content management is implemented on the Documentum platform as a combination of applications and services.

EMC Documentum

Gartner research produces an annual report on the global ECM space. The 2006 report (http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/emc/vol2/article3/article3.html) forecasts a compound annual growth at 12.8% through 2010 and shows EMC Documentum as the clear leader in this space. EMC has been a well-known leader in enterprise storage hardware and technologies and it has enhanced that position with the acquisition of Documentum. The magic quadrant from the Gartner report is shown in the next figure.

EMC Certification

EMC Proven Professional certification is an exam-based certification program, which has introduced a new EMC Proven Content Management Application Developer (EMCAD) track. The first exam in this track is Content Management Foundations (CMF) Associate-level Exam (E20-120). This exam tests knowledge about technical fundamentals of Documentum and is sufficient for achieving the Associate-level certification.

Associate-level certification along with Content Management Server Programming Exam (E20-405) grants a Specialist-level certification. Currently only these two exams are available for Documentum. Another exam for Web Development Kit (WDK) programming is expected to become available soon. However, the CMF exam is likely to be a requirement for all Documentum-related certifications.

Why?

What is the value of possessing a certification? Should I take this certification exam? Such questions arise inevitably when one considers working towards any certification.

The answers to these questions are also inevitably specific to the individual asking the question. The answer depends on various factors including the industry, the supply and demand of skilled professionals in the space, the individual's demonstrable experience, and the employer's policies around certifications.

In a rapidly growing niche space like EMC Documentum, demand far outweighs the supply of skilled professionals and this is reflected in the (average) compensation for EMC Documentum services relative to other areas like enterprise Java. As a result, it is a burden on the entity paying for these services to ensure that the services are well worth the costs. A certification provides an assurance of a baseline skill level for the professional providing these services. Therefore, possession of a certification makes the professional's services more marketable.

Along the same lines, a professional seeking to enter the space may have little specific experience to show and may find it hard to compete with people already in this space. Possession of a certification may push the individual's credibility just high enough to provide an opening from where the professional can prove his or her worth.

Irrespective of your reason for taking a certification exam, it would take commitment (and money, currently US$200) to pass such an exam. Certification exams tend to be more academic than reflective of the real-life practice for the subject. Typically, these exams are based on a well-defined syllabus and tend to test the candidate's awareness or understanding of the concepts, though a smaller number of exams are oriented towards the application of the knowledge as well. Real-life practice typically utilizes a small section of the overall subject knowledge (the clichéd 80-20 term comes to mind) and additional knowledge of related areas to make effective use of the subject.

I recall crossing the fence over to the certified side with the Java Programmer certification exam about six years ago. The preparation experience was incredibly enriching as well as humbling as I systematically nailed my weak areas and worked on them to come out stronger each time. In the next section, I share this preparation approach that essentially ferrets out and eliminates one's weaknesses.

Why?

Now that we know why we should take the certification exam, let's see how to proceed for this exam. You should now be keen to know how to approach and where to register for this professional exam. The following sections will give you the required information.

Approach

Preparation for a professional certification typically competes with other individual responsibilities including work and family. As such, it often becomes an exercise in resource (time, effort, and money) allocation to maximize the results with minimal contention of conflicting demands. In order to make the most of the effort and resources being spent, one needs to prioritize the order in which the topics need attention and the amount of attention required by each topic.

There are probably several good approaches for preparing for exams and their effectiveness varies for individuals due to differences in learning styles. However, I believe that the following approach is a high-level guideline and can be used to tune specific styles of preparation.

If you are familiar with the concept of bottlenecks (as in performance tuning) you will easily identify with this preparation approach. Even if this is a new concept for you it is not very difficult to grasp. It is also similar to what is known as theory of constraints, where you systematically remove constraints to achieve higher performance relative to the goals. The key concept in the approach is to identify your weakest area (bottleneck or constraint) and spend time and resources on learning about it. Now repeat and move on to the next bottleneck. This won't be an exact science but you should be able to see tangible returns in terms of the new knowledge gained (and improving scores).

As may be obvious to the keen mind, the key step in this process is identification of the bottleneck. We need a good tool for identifying our weak areas so that we can focus our efforts and mock tests or practice tests fit this bill wonderfully. Of course, the quality of the questions will matter but if you have a large number of questions to practice with, you are very likely to see the benefits in a short period.

This book attempts to provide a good set of questions to help you focus your learning. Each chapter provides content around the concepts to fill the gaps in your knowledge, but in my opinion the biggest value is added by the rich set of practice questions. Take this approach as a general guideline and tweak your style to make the most out of this book.

Logistics

Once you decide to take this exam, you will need to take care of a few formalities. You will need to register for the exam E20-120 with either of these two:

The exam currently costs US$200. Check for your local test center and find the exact details and policies.

Useful Resources

This book offers an economical option that coherently presents the relevant information in one place along with a large number of practice questions. While this book strives to be the key preparation aid for the CMF exam, there are other valuable resources that can help you excel in this exam and carry on the learning process beyond it. Some of these resources are as follows:

What This Book Covers

This book is organized in chapters based on the structure of the recommended training for the CMF exam (http://mylearn.documentum.com/portals/home/ml.cfm?actionID=65&subjectID=3259).

The chapters are grouped together in parts to provide a logical grouping and order of topics as described below.

Part 1: Fundamentals (Chapters 1 - 4)

ECM Basics introduces the basic concepts of content management. Working with Content describes the aspects of creating and manipulating content. Objects and Types lays the foundation of designing and using metadata. Architecture describes the key components of the EMC Documentum platform and how they interact to provide the content management capabilities.

Part 2: Security (Chapters 5 - 7)

Users and Privileges describes the core concepts related to users for implementing security in Documentum. Groups and Roles provides additional capabilities for facilitating security management for groups of users. Object Security introduces permissions and ties them to users, groups, and privileges to realize the security model.

Part 3: User Interface (Chapter 8)

Searching describes the features for finding relevant content stored in a repository. While other user interface aspects are covered throughout the book, searching is described separately because of its fundamental importance to content management.

Part 4: Application Development (Chapters 9 - 12)

Custom Types describes how to create user-defined metadata structures and fundamental customization aspects. DocApps describes how to package the development artefacts for reuse and portability across repositories. Workflows and Lifecycles describe how to model and implement business processes in Documentum.

Part 5: Advanced Concepts (Chapters 13 - 14)

Aliases describes a mechanism for dynamic assignment of ownership, locations, and permissions. Virtual Documents describes how multiple documents can be managed as one larger document to facilitate collaboration.

There are two practice tests at the end of this book.

There is a set of questions at the end of each chapter. These questions are meant to test your understanding. A good way to prioritize and focus your efforts is to use the questions to identify the areas where you score low and then work on those areas.

The answers to all the questions and the solutions to the practice tests have been provided at the end.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

There are three styles for code. Code words in text are shown as follows: "Each Content Server client that installs the DFC runtime has a local file named dmcl.ini."

A block of code will be set as follows:

SELECT user_name, user_login_name, user_state
FROM dm_user
WHERE user_login_name = 'jdoe'

New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "In this example, John gets permissions in four ways — as the owner of the object, as a specific user, as a member of a specific group, and as an implicit member of World."

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