Documentum is adapting for the newly consolidated world of enterprise content management (ECM) with a release that is intended to accelerate deployments and act as a back-end to Microsoft’s fast-growing SharePoint collaboration server.

Release 6 of the software, out today, promises web services standards and vendor-neutral coding to let the system participate in service-oriented architectures (SOAs), and opens up development through an Eclipse-based IDE. It also offers preconfigured settings for different usage scenarios.

“Companies are starting to standardise on content management platforms because some of them have six to seven different ECM systems, placing an enormous burden on IT,” explained Karin Ondricek, Documentum senior product marketing manager. “The companies leading the industry now are infrastructure vendors such as IBM, EMC [Documentum’s parent company] and Oracle. That changes the ethos of content management [towards simplicity and ease of use].”

CMS Watch analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe said, “Documentum today is facing stiffer competition than it ever has before [since] Oracle and FileNet got their acts together. As ECM is becoming more of an infrastructure purchase, [there is] demand by enterprise architects for true SOA-ready products that adhere to open standards.”

Pelz-Sharpe added that Documentum is also repositioning itself for organisations where SharePoint is already well seeded. “They are right to be worried as, rightly or wrongly, SharePoint is being chosen over full-scale ECM systems. So much ECM is not enterprise at all but departmental – SharePoint often crushes them in those deals,” he said.

Mike Davis of analyst Ovum said Documentum is working hard to adapt. “The big players have moved into its territory where it was always the 800lb gorilla so now it’s shaved off the fur and got a six-pack,” he added.