Documentum

Documentum is an enterprise content management platform, now owned by OpenText, as well as the name of the software company that originally developed the technology. EMC acquired Documentum for US$1.7 billion in December, 2003. The Documentum platform was part of EMC's Enterprise Content Division (ECD) business unit, one of EMC's four operating divisions. On January 23, 2017, OpenText, a Canadian technology firm based in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada that specializes in enterprise content management, acquired Documentum from Dell EMC for$1.62 billion. Howard Shao and John Newton founded Documentum in June 1990. They had worked together at Ingres, one of the leading relational database vendors at the time, and sought to solve unstructured information management problems using relational database technologies. (Unstructured information refers to information that does not have a formal data structure – documents, images, audio, video, etc.) With initial backing from Xerox, they developed a customized system for Boeing to organize, store, maintain, and selectively publish the thousands of pages of information for the Boeing 777 training manuals. They developed another customized system for Syntex, a pharmaceutical vendor, to automate the process of assembling New Drug Application (NDA) documents when seeking approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Documentum introduced its Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) in 1993, a client-server product for electronic document management. This product managed access to unstructured information stored within a shared repository, running on a central server. End users connected to the repository through PC, Macintosh, and Unix Motif desktop client applications. Documentum EDMS provided check-in and check-out access controls as well as workflow capabilities for sequencing document review and approval processes, and included a full-text search engine for retrieving documents from the repository.