Drupal vs. OpenText Documentum

Overall, I would give my rating of Drupal a 7/10 because there is an easy user experience for those without a website background but there is some technology work required to build more website capabilities that aren't as user-friendly. Drupal is specifically well suited to update content (like changing Relationship Manager cards when there is employee turnover), post announcements (putting up a holiday banner to let our customers know the dates we will be closed over Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc., and creating a sophisticated website hierarchy of pages (for our firm, several dropdowns depending on if you're looking for personal banking, business banking, investment banking, about us, etc.).

Incentivized

Documentum is best used in medium to large institutions that can afford it, have alternate solutions for web publishing, and who have either in-house developers or can hire good Documentum developers (not the ones who know Java but do not understand ECM). It is, in my opinion, the best heavy duty ECM solution out there, assuming OT is not gutting it as we speak. That is my only hesitation to not giving it a 10, OpenText is an unknown quantity in this and I worry that they will only support Documentum until they have figured out how to fill the gap between Documentum and OT and then offer a migration path to OT with a Documentum sunsetting as an incentive.

Incentivized

• It has excellent security features and consistent updates.
• It allows for extensive customization with the integrated themes and core code, especially when you first install it. This allows our dev team to get creative with marketing initiatives.
• There is a large online community of Drupal users that consistently help answer any questions and issues

Incentivized

• Records management: Compared to other content management systems, this provides a efficient and scalable solution. It gives lot of flexibility in managing the content as Records or Legal holds.
• Workflow system has external plugins to connect with FAX, Mail, Database and FTP servers etc. which gives an option to integrate with any system with documentum.
• Creation of websites and maintenance is easy. Content authors can create the pages with effective mechanism.

Incentivized

• Security and new release notifications are a hassle as they happen too often
• Allowing them to write PHP modules is a big advantage, but sometimes integrating them is a small challenge due to the version the developer is working on.
• Steep learning curve, but worth it

Incentivized

• WDK framework has been the biggest drawbacks from the application speed point of view, as well as client complexity and not so natural look and feel. Yes, with the latest releases much of these features are improved.
• EMC is very expensive to buy, own and support, where some products require many dependent Docuemntum products to be installed to work at its best.

The time and money invested into this platform were too great to discontinue it at this point. I'm sure it will be in use for a while. We have also spent time training many employees how to use it. All of these things add up to quite an investment in the product. Lastly, it basically fulfills what we need our intranet site to do.

Stability is a key factor as well as its flexibility. Also, any organization that deploys Documentum will have made a significant investment in terms of time and money, so not renewing its commitment can come with a significant cost. That said, the decision to deploy Documentum initially should come only after extensive evaluation, knowing that once deployed it will likely remain the platform of choice.

Incentivized

As a team, we found Drupal to be highly customizable and flexible, allowing our development team to go to great lengths to develop desired functionalities. It can be used as a solution for all types of web projects. It comes with a robust admin interface that provides greater flexibility once the user gets acquainted with the system.

Incentivized

Drupal itself does not tend to have bugs that cause sporadic outages. When deployed on a well-configured LAMP stack, deployment and maintenance problems are minimal, and in general no exotic tuning or configuration is required. For highest uptime, putting a caching proxy like Varnish in front of Drupal (or a CDN that supports dynamic applications).

Drupal page loads can be slow, as a great many database calls may be required to generate a page. It is highly recommended to use caching systems, both built-in and external to lessen such database loads and improve performance. I haven't had any problems with behind-the-scenes integrations with external systems.

Incentivized

As noted earlier, the support of the community can be rather variable, with some modules attracting more attraction and action in their issue queues, but overall, the development community for Drupal is second to none. It probably the single greatest aspect of being involved in this open-source project.

Incentivized

Support is better than with ECM, but could use some improvement.

Incentivized

I was part of the team that conducted the training. Our training was fine, but we could have been better informed on Drupal before we started providing it. If we did not have answers to tough questions, we had more technical staff we could consult with. We did provide hands-on practice time for the learners, which I would always recommend. That is where the best learning occurred.

The on-line training was not as ideal as the face-to-face training. It was done remotely and only allowed for the trainers to present information to the learners and demonstrate the platform online. There was not a good way to allow for the learners to practice, ask questions and have them answered all in the same session.

Plan ahead as much you can. You really need to know how to build what you want with the modules available to you, or that you might need to code yourself, in order to make the best use of Drupal. I recommend you analyze the most technically difficult workflows and other aspects of your implementation, and try building some test versions of those first. Get feedback from stakeholders early and often, because you can easily find yourself in a situation where your implementation does 90% of what you want, but, due to something you didn't plan for, foresee, or know about, there's no feasible way to get past the last 10%

Incentivized

Drupal can be more complex to learn, but it offers a much wider range of applications. Drupal’s front and backend can be customized from design to functionality to allow for a wide range of uses. If someone wants to create something more complex than a simple site or blog, Drupal can be an amazing asset to have at hand.

Incentivized

At the time it was purchased it was one of the best, most robust solutions available on the market.

Incentivized

Drupal is well known to be scalable, although it requires solid knowledge of MySQL best practices, caching mechanisms, and other server-level best practices. I have never personally dealt with an especially large site, so I can speak well to the issues associated with Drupal scaling.

Incentivized

• Given the endless possibilities that Drupal can have, we tend to have great support going on when we get a website launched
• It has become much much faster and easier for us to launch a new project due to reusability
• Configuration management in Drupal helps greatly with CI/CD, saves us costs

• After this product, the client is able to manage content security and due to it, the client is able to use the business process, and this really reduces effort and increases the profit in business.
• It provides integration with SAP easily which really helps the client to manage this effectively and with minimum effort system is ready to use.
• Also searching, automated flows also create a bigger impact and reduce a lot manual effort.

Incentivized