EMC OnDemand: Enabling Distributed Content Features and BOCS

Content delivery is one of the primary use cases for a Content Mangement system.  When users are spread across six different continents, you must have an implementation that ensures timely access for all users – not just those in the local network.  A typical scenario involves the database and primary Content Server deployed in the main North American or European datacenter with remote user groups scattered throughout the world.  These remote offices often have limited network throughput, which makes it even more challenging.

Enter Branch Office Caching Services

Documentum has dealt with this scenario since its inception and has a myriad of options for streamlining delivery to users in geographically distributed locations or different departments, among them: remote content servers with distributed storage areas, federations with replication, and Branch Office Caching Services (BOCS).  When we, as OnDemand Architects, looked at our customer needs and use cases, it became apparent that BOCS would be instrumental in providing remote users the experience they expected – which essentially boils down to application and content access on par with a local deployment.

Working with our customers in the real world, we have seen that web application access for remote users (whether via Webtop, D2, or xCP 2.0) is not signficantly impaired by the incremental increase in latency to return HTML/JS/CSS.  The primary factor in application response and users’ perception of performance was the time it takes to transfer content during import, export, and checkin/checkout operations.

BOCS provides the perfect fit to address this bottleneck with remote content transfer.  To make this concrete, consider the illustration below.  Instead of an end user in Argentina needing to upload their 10Mb Microsoft Word document into the primary OnDemand datacenter in North America, the content is transparently uploaded to their locally installed BOCS server.  To the end user, the import operation finishes almost instantly – leaving the BOCS server to later asynchronously upload the 10Mb file to the primary store.  If another team member also in Argentina requires this content, it is already available and simply served from the local BOCS server cache, again offering a very fast response to the end user.  In anticipation of remote use, content can even be pre-cached from the primary filestore.

OnDemand with the Distributed Content Feature Set

In a customer managed Documentum installation there is a good amount of design, planning, and then work required to get the benefits described above.  The architecture must be throughly understood, a DMS server needs to be installed, ACS needs to be configured properly, and client applications such as D2 or Webtop need configuration changes.  The good news with OnDemand is that a customer only needs to do the following:

  1. Be an OnDemand customer using the Documentum Core stack
  2. Request that the ‘Distributed Content’ feature set be added
  3. Install a lightweight BOCS server following our step-by-step installation guide

The only real work that needs to be done by the customer is installing the BOCS servers into any remote office that needs accelerated content features.  And we make that as simple as possible by providing the exact step-by-step instructions in the attached document, OnDemand BOCS Customer Installation Guide.

We require customers to follow this guide exactly to ensure immediate integration with the OnDemand environment, which includes using pull mode and other naming conventions that guarantee compatability across all the OnDemand certified client applications.