Documentum – end user experience wins again
Yesterday I wrote a post that touched on my frustration with web based team collaboration spaces, lots of people agree and some even got around to commenting which is not that common on my blog! My experience is that many people find collaborative spaces difficult because:
- They require an additional step following saving a file to the file system
- They are slow to upload and download files
- They often have no off-line support and when they do it’s not a seamless experience
- Their ability to sort, filter and perform bulk operations is a lot slower than the file system
- Even if they are integrated with applications, like Office and SharePoint, they are not very good at supporting the number of file operations I do in a day (hundreds) while I search for documents, copy content from old documents to new ones, pull up reference documents for a few minutes, print extracts from documents etc.
- None of these things is as much of an issue for published documents, but for work in progress – where there are perhaps multiple versions a day – they are hopeless.
It’s possible that AJAX, increasing network speeds, improved tagging, better support for rapidly previewing document content in web apps might improve things, but for now, the easiest way to share files within an enterprise is a network file system.
Inter enterprise its interesting to see that Oracle collaboration suite, Groove and now Documentum and probably others that don’t spring to mind have integrated their collaborative workspaces directly into the Windows explorer experience – good move. I have written on related issues before in these posts:
