Earlier this week EMC announced that it was providing more extensive development support for Documentum. This is something we had to comment on, as in our various product evaluations we have long called out EMC Documentum for providing relatively poor support and insight into products as compared to their rivals. It seems that at first blush things are changing for the better.

EMC has made a developer edition of Content Server freely available, and they have also provided a similar free developer environment for xDB. At the same time, each free developer edition will have an accompanying online community that provides code samples, tutorials and full documentation.

All in all, this represents quite a significant turnaround for EMC Documentum and one that is to be applauded. I can speak from personal past experience of the nightmare of finding basic technical advice regarding Documentum releases, and being reduced to scouring the web for potential (and often unreliable) information. This announcement will also provide a sigh of relief for those who have had to pay license fees for Documentum development environments. More importantly it shows EMC 'opening the kimono' (as that awful phrase goes) more widely than we might have expected.

We often comment that Microsoft has also gone from being a secretive firm (even about current releases) to (in the case of SharePoint) a very positive level of openness, community support and involvement. As always it will be time that decides the success of the EMC initiative, but I suspect it will be just as successful as Microsoft's community initiative around SharePoint, as there is an established, vibrant and very sizeable Documentum community out there who have long awaited this day.