Thousands of OpenText Documentum users worldwide have automatically associated the dqMan with fme for many years. At the corresponding trade shows, it regularly happens to us that visitors walk by our booth, pause briefly to check out what we offer, frown, and then ask us the following question: “fme – what do you guys do again, exactly? I’m sure I know you.”

As soon as we then introduce ourselves as a service and technology partner for OpenText Documentum, the penny usually drops immediately: “Right, now I know – I use your dqMan!” This is often followed by enthusiastic statements about the free use of the tool, sometimes even a technical question about the software, but the users are always happy to have met us in person after having been our customers for years.

Maybe you feel the same way – you use dqMan as a free administration tool for your OpenText Documentum applications and wonder which story is behind this great piece of software?

dqMan – Here’s how it all began

In 2002 I started at fme AG as a consultant. I quickly noticed how cumbersome the administration of Documentum* was, especially the handling of DQL and API. There was only the web-based administrator, version 4, where you could type in a query and execute it. After that, the query was gone. No matter if there was an error in the query or the query had to be changed, everything had to be retyped.

Some of my colleagues used to put text files on the desktop of their computer to have important queries quickly at hand. That seemed very cumbersome to me.
One of my projects at that time was the development of the first client for the fme migration-center. This was written in Delphi. Soon the discussion came up: “Delphi is quite good, but is it able to communicate with Documentum at all?

This question then kept me busy and I built a small tool for this purpose. It should be able to execute a DQL query and deliver the result. A name was found quickly, the Document Query Manager.

As soon as it was ready, it was used by the one or the other colleague. Features were added, such as the function to store query favorites and a history. A simple export to Excel could not be missing, and the tool was already pretty usable. New requirements and ideas came up, and I integrated them with growing enthusiasm. Over time, the Document Query Manager evolved into the dqMan.

My philosophy has always been to avoid creating a black box. There were some of those, but real administrators and developers want to see what is executed to be able to adjust this if necessary. Therefore there are e.g. few predefined functions, but a whole set of predefined script templates, which are executed by a corresponding script engine. The templates can be modified by the users or they may even create their own. Object-specific functions can be developed by script and included in the context menu depending on the object type.

dqMan as a freeware admin tool for the Documentum community

Since 2005, the dqMan has been available for free download on the fme AG website. After the first 100 downloads, I received an appreciative email from the fme board. The 10,000 downloads were exceeded around 2012, then I stopped counting. However, the number of downloads each year is more than 1000 and we have many thousands of customers all over the world as a result. We are happy if you are one of them!

Internally at fme, dqMan has also become indispensable. In client projects, dqman helps us to administrate OpenText Documentum and to develop applications. It saves valuable working time and the use of predefined and frequently tested functions certainly does not harm the quality within the project. My colleagues in Romania also use dqMan on a daily basis in development and especially in projects with our product migration-center.

A colleague who has worked with the dqMan from the very beginning once described it as an equivalent of my Documentum knowledge. This is quite true.In the course of more than 10 years I have continued to develop the dqMan even further. Every time I learned something new or new requirements came up, new dqMan features were implemented.

So meanwhile more than 10 years of knowledge in development, operation and consulting in the Documentum environment live in the dqMan. And a lot of joy and successful experiences. Currently we are evaluating whether we as fme should update my self-developed product, expand it for other platforms and distribute it professionally. We’ re keeping it exciting.

If you have downloaded dqMan only recently, please have a look at our datasheet to get an overview of how this cool can unburden you from various administration tasks with OpenText Documentum. I am curious if you know all functionalities and benefits.

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* Documentum is a platform for Enterprise Content Management and belongs to the OpenText portfolio