The dumbest licensing scheme.
This distinction has to go to EMC for their Documentum licensing. Yet like so many other software companies, the details of these licenses are hidden until the sales rep smells blood in the water.
So this is the scam: EMC/Documentum provides an out-of-the-box browser client for their users, called WebTop, that is $240 per head*. The client is clumsy and slow, and is also built on J2EE which my current employer does not want to use since modifications to this client would take new skillsets and tools.
Documentum also comes with an .NET Interop for their Java API, and they give you an ADO.NET driver so you can query the system with the DQL language (a SQL variant). Since the plan was to deploy documentum in a phased approach, we decided to write our own .NET based Documentum client using the API and ADO connector.
So we had some issues with what we purchased from EMC (via a third party that EMC recommended) and asked for some shuffling of licenses and maybe a price break on another product, when EMC tells us that we have to pay a client access fee even if we write our own client. Nothing unusual here, Lotus has a CAL for users who use Domino applications via a browser. What is the cost of this CAL? The same cost as the WebTop client license - $240. HUH?! (this should shed light on the quality of the Webtop client if they are willing to give it away)
This insanity has left this project in a little bit of limbo and it is made worse by the fact that EMC has not even attempted to call and reconcile our issues when we did not renew our licensing on 7/1. It seems that these EMC sales reps have fallen into that trap that I so loathed at IBM: we’re big, so we don’t have to care.
As a sidebar, I loaded a test Sharepoint server (total install time 35 minutes) and its built in Document Management tool is very cool, very fast, and alot cheaper. Not to mention, easily extendable with in-house skillsets.
* EMC also charges some hefty server licenses, and we pay a scaled fee for the number of documents scanned and stored.
July 10th, 2006 at 8:44 pm
If you don’t have the regulatory requirements for a system like Documentum, why in the world would you use it? This is a system that makes Domino.doc look great (not so easy to do). If you can get away with Sharepoint go for it. The EMC tool is one big, ugly, expensive monster. We’ve been getting rid of our EMC hardware, but Documentum is so entrenched that we’re stuck.
July 10th, 2006 at 8:55 pm
That’s the trap Frank. Organizations frequently do not have doc mgmt skillsets in-house when they start thinking about using a DM solution. So they rely on “experts” to guide them, but end up getting guided into a dead end. Companies like EMC rely on this ignorance and aim to become the entrenched solution that nobody can move from.
In Healthcare we have alot of regulatory requirements, especially medical claims with which we get about 5000 written claims per day. Some would say we need a product like Documentum, but nobody seems to be able to tell us exactly why. AS long as it can be indexed, searched, and retrieved in a reasonable amount of time, what’s the catch?
December 3rd, 2006 at 5:08 pm
It is correct that software vendors do tend to come up with silly pricing schemes. They also hide their prices until the last moment. This is really annoying.
I would recomment looking into infoRouter. A fantastic product with very reasonable pricing attached to it. They are responsive, kind and the product is phenomenal.