Documentum sets sights on publishers

Software maker Documentum, a specialist in content management products, announced Tuesday a new package designed to help publishing companies automatically reuse content in a variety of formats.

The new Enterprise Publishing Solution package combines Documentum's main enterprise content management applications with other server software from the Pleasanton, Calif.-based company and its partners. The tools allow text, images and other content to be shared among a variety of systems, said Mark Arbour, director of product marketing for Documentum.

Documentum repository that looks like a regular network drive, Arbour said. Items can then be retrieved and reused by common publishing applications such as Quark Xpress and Adobe Photoshop, without requiring customers to learn new directory structures and other details.

"One of the biggest challenges (with a content management package) is to get the creative people to use it," Arbour said. "We do the work behind the scenes by making Documentum look like a hard drive."

The Documentum software also parses publishing files as they're saved, tagging images, text and other objects to allow them to be reused in other documents.

"When you save that Quark document to the Documentum repository, we analyze that and take the images out and create alternative representation of that content," Arbour said. "It's easy to say you support Quark or (Adobe's) InDesign if you just store it as a dumb blob in the system, but there's not much value in that."

The Documentum software also lets administrators set rules for how items are used for various publishing formats. A photo can be automatically resized, for example, for display on a Web page versus a print catalog.