Documentum Administrator plugins installation not possible

In some customer’s contexts you cannot install whatever you want. For policy reasons, or security. And documentum components really love to install client softwares to interact with them. In this blog we will discuss about the Documentum Administrator tool and the plugins it asks to install in order to gain full access to its functionalities.

Documentum Administrator’s plugins

DA requires at least 3 things to be installed on client machines in order to have the file transfer working:

• The browser extension (IE, Chrome, Firefox, aso)
• The NativeSetup.exe
• You will have to change some settings in the browsers as well, in order to allow the execution of some scripts for these sites, white list it, and so on

These two programs allow to transfer and view files from the Documentum Administrator web application. I think it should be the same for Webtop as it’s based on the same. Unfortunately, some customers cannot allow users, even administrators to run specific exe files on their machines. So we tried to install them manually with some policies allowance and some elevated rights but it didn’t work very well as our policies were too restrictive.

In addition we were not allowed to change some parameters in the browsers as it was managed by the security team. So what can we do?

Setup Documentum Administrator in HTTP mode

Depending on what you need to do with the DA, you can enable the HTTP mode. This mode allows to use the default browser/http transfer protocols, hence it will not require anything to be installed on the end user machine. However this mode has some drawbacks and limitations.

Here is how to enable the HTTP mode:

1. Login to the web server and navigate to the exploded war file folder
2. Locate the file: da/wdk/app.xml
3. Change <default-mechanism> in <contentxfer> to http
4. Save the file and restart the web application server
5. Allow popups in the browser

Now the content transfer has been set to http mode.

Limitations

HTTP content transfer is supported for XML files but only for a single file used with the Default XML Application. For virtual documents, only the root (parent) file is transferred. The browser handles the launch of viewing and editing applications.

The checkout directory is not configurable. To checkout a document, users must select Edit, then either save the document or open and save it. On checkin, the user must navigate to the location in which the document was saved. User preferences are not supported in this mode.