I’m working on a prototype at the moment that requires me to insert data into offline tables (offline as far as Documentum is concerned). The examples that I’ve found all resort to specifying the exact structure of the table.

create table DMI_OBJECT_TYPEx (

R_OBJECT_ID VARCHAR2(16) NOT NULL,

I_TYPE NUMBER(10,0) NOT NULL,

I_PARTITION NUMBER(10,0) NULL);

The example above is smaller than most of the tables I have to create. The weakness with this is that you have to look up the table structure. The writers probably chose this method because the much simpler syntax shown below also brings any data that is in the table.

CREATE TABLE DMI_OBJECT_TYPEx AS SELECT * FROM DMI_OBJECT_TYPE;

My initial thought was why not copy the table and then just truncate it, but after a bit of searching I stumbled upon the solution. Essentially adding a WHERE clause to the end of the query that never evaluates to TRUE enables us to take the structure without the data.

CREATE TABLE DMI_OBJECT_TYPEx AS SELECT * FROM DMI_OBJECT_TYPE WHERE 1=2;

(If you’re not technical don’t bother reading this)

I’m sitting in a presentation about a couple of new(ish) Documentum products. I’m streaming my thoughts while my colleague Andrew shows off ‘My Documentum for Outlook’ and ‘My Documentum Offline’.

Because I know that there are going to be people that will see this and wonder what Documentum is, it’s an Enterprise level content management system. One of a couple of different systems that big companies choose when they need to manage documents.

The new clients look impressive, certainly there has been a lot of engineering put into building tools that are supposed to be easier to use, intuitive, and seamlessly integrated into the environment.

Being intuitive is something that content management systems have struggled with in the past. The basic product is taking away the familiar save to My Documents (or a Network Drive) and replacing it with a web interface.

It’s slower than just saving it to a Hard Drive, and while there are many benefits (such as version control), they’re often sacrifices that users feel are not worth it. That’s not even including lost productivity when the system isn’t working properly or the users haven’t been trained properly.

Being intuitive is something that can’t be overrated. Having the ability to work offline and have the application manage the synchronization in the background is a victory.

The changes to the interface compared to the existing Webtop and Application Connector product lines may cause problems for EMC and any clients that choose to implement it - There is a certain amount of cost associated with retraining users to the new system.

On the other hand its worth trialling (regular) users - we’re all to informed about how content management systems work to determine if it’s truly a friendly interface for people that aren’t familiar with content management.

Now back to the grindstone.