How Cadence developed a user-friendly document management system using Documentum
Presenters were:

Amy Witherow (amy@cadence.com)- Sr. Technical Publications Manager,Cadence Design Systems. Amy has been a manager, technical writer, production supervisor and graphic artist.

Cris Reeser - Sr. Technical Publications Consultant FrameMaker, scripting, and release processing

Marie Salet - Member of Consulting Staff, Cadence Design Systems Primary engineer

Summary of presentation:
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Cadence customer studies show that what customers want from documentation is to:

* Find info quickly (be able to search for it, be able to navigate within the info)
* Have all info in one place
* Have all of a company's docs to have a consistent look and feel

Cadence currently has 132 writers, and over 300 products, and about 1350 documents. However, Cadence is really a conglomeration of many bought-up companies, all of which had their own way of doing things.

To deliver the type of consistent documentation that customers want, Cadence decided to invest in an overhaul of their entire documentation management system so as to standardize templates and the means of storing and distributing docs.

[For this investment, Cadence Tech Pubs gained approval from their Finance Dept (1) when they informed Finance that certain tax laws allow companies to "re-engineer a corporate system", which permits companies to capitalize the cost of both the required equipment and consultants over several years and (2) when they presented estimates of the cost savings in terms of production support and writing time.]

For their document management tool, Cadence choose Documentum, used on top of an Oracle database.
(Other tools they looked at were: LiveLink, Domino.doc, and IntraDoc.)

For the document management system overhaul team, Cadence developed a cross-functional team that included writers, a Documentum developer who was on-call for the first several months, and a software engineer who was and is full time on the project.

The plan used to develop the system design was the following:

* The development team wrote down the requirements for the system,
based on needs from the writing community and management.
* A software engineer from the technical publications staff developed the document management system.
* A Publications Support person developed the FrameMaker templates.
* Writers tested both the templates and the document management system * Writers gave feedback on the document management system

Many writers did't want to learn a new tool. So to "sell" writers on Documentum, Cadence made as one of the system overhaul requirements a modification of the FrameMaker API interface to allow a customized, seamless, easy-to-use entry into a Documentum/Oracle document management system.

This modified FrameMaker API was to handle all aspects of a document management system, including:

* Source control. (It is critical that writers can easily find source documents in the system.)

* Automatic version control

* Automatic backup and recovery

* Checkin / checkout

* File sharing

* Automatic requirement checks that would ensure consistency of file-naming requirements and image-naming requirements The document management system that Cadence developed met those requirements.

* In addition, when files are checked into Documentum (using the modified FrameMaker API), on a UNIX server, they are "automagically" rendered into html files that can even be automatically put into "kits" so that they are "shippable" items on a CD-ROM.

The Cadence document management system also does the following:

* Performs many prechecks, including formatting flows

* Automatically produces file metatags

* Allows html and pdf files to be generated. (HTML files are created using WebWorks' Automapper)

Benefits of this document management system: ============================================

* Standardized tools and processes

* Time savings in writing and production areas

* Depending on the length of the file, the file rendering that occurs automatically upon checkin can take as long as 1/2 hour to an hour. But, because they're using a big machine with lots of RAM and CPU, the rendering actually takes MUCH LESS time on the document management system than it would if it ran on the writers' machine.

Possible drawbacks to this document management system: ======================================================

The main drawback for individual writers is that they can't
be creating new templates and styles as easily. There is a
process for this. It means, though, that the writers can
focus more on the much harder job of writing the content.

(Thanks to BAPMF member Linda O'Maley for providing the meeting notes.)