I am often asked a variety of questions regarding; How should we structure our enterprise Documentum
foundation to best service our business?

Other Typical questions consist of;

• What is the best way to manage content?
• Should we create individual Docbase’s for each customer unit or use one large Docbase?
• How do we store documents in different locations and still maintain control? There are many more questions on this subject so we will explain at a high level the architecture of Federations and Distributed Docbase models.

Federations

The description of a Federation as described by Documentum is: Multiple repositories linked together across logical and geographic boundaries that form virtual repositories. Immediate access to information is enabled as content is physically distributed but logically integrated within the enterprise. Additionally, these federations provide the enterprise with unlimited capacity to manage large volumes of digital assets as units, including automatic synchronization of those repositories, thereby reducing the administrative overhead that it would ordinarily take to individually manage multiple content repositories.

In 1859 gold was discovered in the state of Colorado. This was the beginning of a booming economy and a need born as to where to store the new gold being extracted. There were similar problems in California and Alaska during their gold rush periods.

Eventually the United States government established the Denver Mint as a gold repository and minting operation. The regional banks held gold in various forms from dust to coins in there vaults. To keep track of the gold the banks assigned bank accounts to its depositors. The information about each ounce of gold was tallied in to bound books. The account books as we call them today kept track of the who, what, where and how about the gold being stored in the banks vault (repository).