Frequently Asked Questions about Content Manager OnDemand

What is IBM Content Manager OnDemand?

Widely known as "IBM CMOD" or "CMOD" or just "OnDemand", it was originally a product of the IBM Printing Systems division (now Ricoh). It serves the Enterprise Content Management ("ECM") or Enterprise Report Management ("ERM") space to assist organizations deal with enormous volumes of data, primarily in AFP, Line Data, PDF, Image (TIFF, GIF, JPEG, PNG), and XML formats.

IBM CMOD also includes the OnDemand Web Enablement Kit ("ODWEK") which allows customers to build unique solutions that leverage the power of Content Manager OnDemand.

What are IBM CMOD's strengths?

OnDemand has the ability to ingest billions of documents (multiple terabytes!) over the course of a day, every day, for as long as there is available storage to write to.

Through connections to Tivoli Storage Manager, cloud services like Amazon S3, or Apace Hadoop HDFS, IBM CMOD can manage as much data as you can afford to store.

Content Manager OnDemand "de-composes" AFP and PDF documents to de-duplicate and store resource information like images, fonts, graphic elements, and overlays to save tremendous amounts of storage space.

In addition to IBM CMOD's de-duplication abilities, it both compresses and bundles individual reports and data into larger files, minimizing overhead in filesystems and in storage managers.

Compliance with data retention laws is fairly straightforward with IBM CMOD -- provided the appropriate WORM devices, IBM CMOD can be configured to use them through IBM Spectrum Protect (formerly Tivoli Storage Manager).

Content Manager OnDemand is highly recognized as the 'gold standard' in document archiving, and has always appeared in each version of the "Gartner Magic Quadrant" in the coveted 'upper right corner' -- leading the pack as a leader in the industry.

What are CMOD's weaknesses?

As an archive, CMOD lacks workflow features that are available in other products in the ECM space. In versions of IBM CMOD v8.5 and higher, OnDemand can integrate into complimentary products like FileNet P8, Content Manager, and Records Manager to provide this ability.

Automatically indexing data is complex, and IBM CMOD's ACIF tool is complex and often frustrating to use. However, once configured properly, IBM CMOD's indexing tools will happily process petabytes of data quickly.

OnDemand also lacks an automatic versioning system -- documents with the same index criteria appear alongside previous versions without any distinction between them. This can be addressed through various tricks and manual steps, but is a common failing.

What is IBM CMOD ODWEK?

ODWEK is a feature of OnDemand that allows for programmatic access to CMOD through a Java API. Historically, IBM CMOD supported CGI, Java Servlets, and Enterprise Java Beans, but all these methods have been deprecated.

How to I download ODWEK?

The OnDemand Web Enablement Kit ("ODWEK") is bundled with the IBM CMOD Installer since v9.5 and higher. This simplifies the installation and upgrade process, and helps to keep IBM CMOD and ODWEK at the same version numbers. You can download base level installers through IBM Passport Advantage, and links to IBM CMOD patches can be found on the Security Bulletins & Updates page.

Where is the ODWEK documentation?

The documentation for ODWEK's ODApi.jar can be found inside the IBM CMOD installation directory - /opt/ibm/ondemand/V9.5/www/api/ODApiDoc.zip. There is also an ODWEK Implementation Guide for [File:ODWEK_Implementation_v95.pdf v9.5] and the IBM CMOD v10.1 Knowledge Centre