We are using PD in support of our EA Program. Current efforts have been focused on getting started from a zero base and working on ensuring we have a consistent baseline for the 100(ish) business systems that this effort encompasses. This has largely been an exercise in locating existing (mostly dated) documentation, finding out that there are waaaaay more knowledge gaps than we originally expected, and authoring models to create a common baseline of knowledge aligned with our TOGAF based metamodel/framework. We have been developing baseline models for business areas and systems that encompass business process, application architecture and infrastructure architecture (all at higher levels more appropriate to EA overviews).
Anyway ..... along the way there have been boatloads of challenges locating documentation that is most often squirelled away in places where only a few people have access or it has been forgotten all-together. One of the next steps we are considering is consolidating and applying some mgmt and governance to the feeder knowledge. This knowledge would NEVER be considered for re-factoring/recreation in EA models and I estimate is about 5000 documents in various formats. I would like to complement the EA Repository (in PD) and our framework with an enterprise knowledge/document mgmt repository.
Ideally I would like to integrate the two at some level. In my ideal world (where the sun always shines and the people are all pretty!), I would see a document mgmt (DM) system where supporting docs are managed. Some of the classification metadata used in PD is applicable in DM. An integration in PD for pointing to External FIles managed in the DM would be present. PD would have custom scripting to pull/synchronize DM metadata for individual documents.
I would like to hear if any of you have tried or heard of someone trying to do something similar. If so, how did it turn out?
A couple notes:
1. I know that I could try to use PD as a sort of DM. Some work at scripting and creating a few extensions for the DM metadata framework would do the trick in the short term. However, I believe that I should be looking for tools suitable to the job and not try to make PD into something it is definitely not designed for. Unless you have seen an enterprise-scale usage of PD for something like this, I am probably not all that open to this path (that being said I am open to being convinced by strong argument/evidence).
2. I think this place has some sort of enterprise licensing in place for Documentum so any experiences with that would be particularly interesting.
Thanks much for any input you might have.
Bruce
