I’m currently finishing a migration from documentum 6.6 to 7.2, Webtop 6.8 and xCP 1.6 (mixed mode installation as ECD calls it), these are some of my thoughts/tips/warnings on the migration process

• There’s this legend about my ability to come across bugs in every product/project I’m involved. I’m glad to say that this migration hasn’t been an exception, thanks JBOSS.

• I wonder if EMC will ever sort the downloads/subscribenet out. They keep trying to hide the new stuff but (luckily) we keep find it. With every Documentum release we get a new way to sort the stack. I think it’s currently easier to find non supported versions (cs 5.3) than some products from recent versions…

• I hate w2k8 action centre and I always forget to edit files with a program ran as administrator, so I’m always getting the “the file cannot be saved” message. Running some preoducts without administrator privileges shows some funny error messages, such as Process Builder 6.7 SP2 failing because “Process Builder 6.6 can’t work with versions newer than 6.5”

• I hate w2k8 and ipv6. The ACS log will go crazy complaining about ipv6 related errors unless you completely disable ipv6 in windows registry.

• Do we really need a JBOSS in order to run ServerApps and acs? If we’ve already ditched DFS from the JMS (see my previous post about DFS 7.2) and considering that besides those who are in a distributed environment, everyone I know first thing they do right after finishing the installation is to disable the acs/bocs stuff to avoid content transfer problems, why can’t we go back to Tomcat? Soon JMS will have higher requierments than CS

• I hate having to “patch” dmldap.jar with every new version or patch. Please EMC add more LDAP support (ie: openLDAP) OOTB (I’m sure most of the community can provide you the code :D)

• Presets still don’t work if you name them with blanks (ie: “preset one”) with no warning/error whatsoever. My bad for not remembering how long it took us to realise this the first time we used them.

• Why doesn’t EMC attach a list of modified WDK components (options added to configuration files, modified jsps) since the last release to the release notes? Instead we have to check component by component what/if something has changed

• Webtop 6.8 feels slower to me. Not measured (yet), just have the feeling that I spend more time watching a white browser tab while something loads. It could be due to the new development environment not having enough resources to run smoothly though. We’ll see what happens when we move to the production servers.

• Most stuff from the 7.2 stack works just fine with Java 8, except (that I now of) JMS (not big problem as it uses internal jre7) and Rest Services (There’s some problem with a spring library not working at all with Java 8)

• Everytime I use a dump, I forgot something that it gets moved to the new Repo when it shouldn’t. I have to check more carefully the dump conditions

• Installing Documentum 7.2 with xCP 1.x mixed mode is an adventure due to the lack of information (What you can find in 7.2 release notes/requirements/supported versions is about 7.1/xCP2.1). I’ve just installed PE from xCP 2.2 and pb/fb from 6.7SP2 and it seems to be working. For now.