EMC Banks on Speeding Your Loan Approval

The next version of Documentum includes advanced business process management tools.

ORLANDO, Fla.—Information storage giant EMC on May 22 introduced a new toolset it hopes will simplify transaction processing for its customers, making it easier for them to process more transactions in less time.

The new BPM (business process management) application, called TaskSpace, allows employees to get a single view of transaction-based processes such as loan approvals without having to toggle from one view or application to another.

Whitney Tidmarsh, vice president of content management and archiving at EMC, noted that TaskSpace also allows customers to move from one task to the next once the first task has been completed without having to return to the first screen of the application.

"Its all about speed and efficiency and minimizing the interruptions in the workflow," she said during an interview with eWEEK editors at the EMC World partner conference here.

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The application also has been designed to allow employees to zoom into views of printed documents or see various documents side-by-side in a way that allows them to streamline their workflows.

Tidmarsh said that TaskSpace also has included native functionality from document-capture application Captiva. This means that an employee can request a document be re-scanned if the first scan is unclear and receive it immediately, without having to interrupt the process.

EMC has designed the application to be easier for companies to configure for the purposes of their particular industries, which often have different terminologies for similar processes.

"The ability to tailor the interface to terminology is just point and click," said Tidmarsh.

TaskSpace is one of several features of Documentum 6, which EMC Senior Vice President of Content Management and Archiving Balaji Yelamanchili called "one of the most important releases weve ever done."

The underlying theme of all the features is the ability to federate information wherever it resides and make it available as needed.

It also includes a new collaborative workspace that is intended to compete with the collaborative workflow capabilities from Microsoft and IBM.

Yet EMC is struggling to iron out bugs with enterprise search, which began for some customers when EMC switched to FAST from Verity, which had been the applications native search engine for the previous 10 years.

Tidmarsh said Documentum 6 includes a new search infrastructure that allows customers to use other enterprise search applications.

"Its a very large leap forward," she said.

Tidmarsh said EMC underestimated the challenges represented by switching search technology. "FAST is a vastly different technology from Verity, and we needed a release to get it right," she said.

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