I have just returned from day one of the EMC World conference. I was able to attend a couple of sessions, had a few client meetings, and spent some time talking to folks at the Blue Fish booth.

I spent most of my energy learning about D6, the latest version of the Documentum platform that will be released in the July-August timeframe. Here are some of the notable things about D6 that I learned today:

• The embedded version of Tomcat that Documentum uses as its Java Method Server will be replaced with a version of BEA Weblogic that better supports Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs).
• Eventually, EMC will provide VMWare images with pre-installed versions of Documentum. This will make it much easier to get a Documentum environment up and running, particularly for development and testing.
• Following the release of D6, EMC is moving to a more aggressive release schedule. Instead of releasing major versions every 3 years with a ton of features, they will release a major version every 18 months with fewer features. EMC believes that this will ease the pain of upgrading.
• I’m probably most excited about some of the usability improvements that have been made to WebTop. The D6 version of WebTop will include multi-select without checkboxes (using shift-click and control-click), right-click context menus, and keyboard shortcuts.
• The first service pack for D6 will include some interesting offline capabilities. Apparently, you will be able to synchronize a folder in a Documentum repository with a folder on your hard disk. Any changes you make to the local version will be imported into the repository the next time you synchronize. You’ll even be able to update metadata offline. I need to dig into this some more to better understand how it works.
• The Documentum Client Library (DMCL) has been rewritten entirely in Java. This will make it much easier to deploy web-based Documentum applications. Previously, the DMCL had been written in C++, requiring a separate installer.
• The developer tools such as Documentum Application Builder and Documentum Application Installer have been replaced with Eclipse plugins.