Starting with DocuWare version 7.8, Dell EMC Centera / Dell EMC ECS devices are no longer supported as storage media for on-premises solutions. Please take this into account for new customer business.
The reason for this discontinuation of support is that this 20-year-old interface to Dell EMC devices severely hinders the further development of DocuWare. Developing a new interface for the current generation of Dell EMC ECS devices would also not be proportionate because of the very small number of customers this represents for DocuWare.
With the few existing DocuWare customers who use a Dell EMC solution, we are already in contact with the Partners supporting them to determine alternatives.
DocuWare has supported EMC Centera devices for storing large amounts of data for many years. To do this, we use a proprietary Centera API, which has been around since at least 2002. In 2016, Dell acquired its competitor EMC. As early as 2018, Dell began discontinuing the sale of Centera devices and starting in April 2023 there will no longer be support for these devices from Dell (EOSL, "End of Service Life"). The continued operation of a 20-year-old interface, which has not been maintained by either EMC or Dell for years, is difficult for the technical progress of DocuWare products.
Dell is trying to migrate its customers to the successor product "Dell EMC ECS," which can also be addressed via the Centera API. Although the ECS offers several interfaces, the effort to implement another interface in the ECS is not appropriate due to the small number of customers. In addition, the Centera interface is not interoperable—that is, all files that have been imported into the ECS via this interface can only be read out via this interface. If DocuWare supported a different interface to the ECS, our customers would still have to migrate their data.
