Stellent vs. Documentum, Managing Users

James McGovern recently posted a complaint about how difficult it is to use Documentum with externalized user repositories (Stellent 1, Documentum 0). This time, one of James's minions couldn't find a Documentum API for adding users!

I could have sworn that Documentum had something like that... it appears that the DFC supports adding one user to one group at a time, as noted by Pie Guy, but the API won't let you add users to multiple groups in one shot... you need multiple API calls to do that.

My advice? If you're using Documentum a lot, get to learn Jython or JRuby. Documentum has a Java API, which is accessible from Jython (Java-based-Python) or JRuby (Java-based-Ruby). Then your administrators can whip out quick Python scripts for user and data management... which is sure faster than whipping out a full-blown-gonzo-whopper J2EE application every time...

To reiterate, stuff like this isn't really needed in Oracle/Stellent... they separate users from content, and encourage people to do all user management in LDAP or Active Directory. It works great.

If you chose to not use a separate user repository, then you can use the one built-in. If you want to script user creation, no problem. Use the ADD_USER service with any number of SOA interfaces (.NET, Java, Ruby, Python, etc.), or the command line IdcCommand tool.

James keeps a pretty good eye on how content management could better fit into the enterprise... I wonder what he would think of my theory that Enterprise 2.0 means the end of slow business process?

We can always hope...