Last week Documentum announced that it has acquired the askOnce business unit of Xerox for the content integration functions of its Virtual Repository.
Documentum customers will get better access to disparate documents if the virtual repository supports the kinds of content and workflow they use, according to analysts at Garter.
Karen M. Shegda and Kenneth Chin in a brief issued this week, say that "The market has driven Documentum to embrace the "virtual content repository" Traditionally, content management vendors want to own as much content in their repositories as possible. However, the typical enterprise has many separate applications that generate documents and content, each stored in dedicated repositories. To maximize the value of their application investments, enterprises need a single, comprehensive view of what's there, simple access, and the ability to distribute the content to various business applications and to incorporate it in workflows. Documentum has finally acknowledged this requirement, which many competitors already support. IBM, Open Text and Vignette built their own content integration middleware to enable the virtual repository, while Hummingbird, FileNet and Interwoven license Venetica's VeniceBridge technology."
According to Gartner, Documentum follows the common approach of achieving content integration through packaged adapters, and the askOnce technology can tap "more than a hundred different content sources including Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange, databases such as Oracle and SQL Server," and search engines.
Although askOnce has 50 customers, say the analysts, it has limited visibility in the market.

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