I used Documentum extensively back in the 2000-2002 timeframe, so my knowledge is a little dated but I can tell you what I know. A very expensive resource, Documentum is one of those things where once you buy it you want to get your money's worth. I actually watched as one engineer was assigned the task of evaluating CMS systems for the web architecture, he chose Interwoven over Documentum, and the manager took him into a room and did not come out until the numbers had been shuffled so that Documentum won.
It's like paying for Oracle and then having somebody come along and say "No thanks, leave that on the shelf, I'd rather have MySQL."

The software was always more of an "enterprise document management solution" onto which they bolted the web publishing stuff. It is very, very good at workflow - I've never seen better. If you've got a process that involves any people having to sign off, or event driven publishing ("Make this document live across all sites at midnight"), etc... then it is excellent. You can send a document to multiple managers at a single level and require that only one of them either forward or reject it, you get real inbox alerts when document status changes, and so on. In all my future work I've based workflows on the "If only we had Documentum" approach.

Now, about the Web Publisher. That was a very new component when I was using the software. Arguably we (Scudder Kemper Investments) helped a great deal with the debugging of it early in the day. When we were using it, I found it primitive. The idea of "Create an XML object representing a story, and then just have the content people fill in a form that populates the XML, which you then publish as HTML" as really really new. The flexibility was just not good enough. I had hoped that this became second nature to them over the intervening years, but maybe not.

Hope that helps. I don't have any experience integrating with SAP.
Source(s):
Worked with Documentum for close to 5 years in the 1998-2003 days, launched all the retail business units for Scudder Investments (16 of them) on it. Took us through at least one buyout/namechange, too, which is a heavy duty impact on content management.


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