Installing EMC Documentum Developer Ed

DocumentumDL For personal interest I wanted to install EMC Documentum to understand more about how it works, what development API and SDK is offered and how Documentum compares Sharepoint as they both overlap each other, in the document management marketplace. We are already a EMC development partner, integrating with the EMC Centera product, so went to the EMC developer area and I downloaded the Documentum Developer edition.

Documentum Virtual PC Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008

Running Windows 7 on my laptop I wanted to use this as an opportunity to try out the recently installed Release Candidate of virtual PC, that is now a component of Windows 7. I normally use VMWare Workstation. Although the specification requested server 2003R2, I installed a copy of server 2008 as it is so quick to install compared to 2003. I went to install Documentum and found I needed the Java engine installing, so I installed that. I guessed I’d need SMTP server and IIS and a few other obvious services running on the server to support the application, I enabled the key ones.

OK so the installer does indicate it is only for 2003 R2 server, but what the heck, mostly things work ok on 2008 that claim to be for 2003, I tried and failed to get the install to work due to various errors including too many service brokers. After a few attempts followed what I am supposed to do…

Server 2003 R2

I then installed the server 2003 R2, installing the supporting windows features and Java I expected I needed. I also enabled the client tools to allow me to link to the Documentum installer files on the client machine.

I attempted to run the installer from the client, but this bombed out half way through on the SQL server install. So I moved the installer to the VM system drive root. This time the install failed again. Finally I disabled client tools and the install then seemed to work. I guess client tools opens a terminal server RDP connection to the VM, mapping the local resources (clue in the [\tsclient](file://\tsclient) mappings). Something in the installer didn’t like the RDP connection as disabling the client tools seems to have worked.

CaptureWebtop

Now to start prodding it to see what I could do with Documentum and see what integration may be possible.