A savvy EMC|Documentum integration partner shared an observation recently that some new Documentum customers were opting for the company's collaboration product, eRoom, for basic document management. Like Documentum's Records Manager product, eRoom today still has its own separate repository and set of basic repository services, including workflow. In short, it's self-contained. But unlike Documentum's core Content Server, eRoom is relatively cheap (~$50k) and doesn't require scads of add-on modules and consultants to get running. "Customers get the cachet of Documentum without the expense," the partner concluded. Yeah, well, that's true, until licensees want to "upgrade" to something more substantial and realize that they have to swap in an entirely different Documentum infrastructure. Still, the phenonemon validates what we've been saying for a while: the world wants simple document management, even if we have to buy collaboration systems like eRoom, SharePoint, or Plone to get it.