Documentum might well set a trend for the next generation of ECM with the announcement of its version 6 release today.

Due to be generally available in about a month, D6 is a platform play that, as the firm’s Karin Ondricek explained to me last week, decouples the ECM applications themselves from the underlying managment services and goes hunting for developer support and faster setup.

Documentum says it wants to play nice with SOA environments so it has given web services a hearty hug and stripped out tags, metadata and other code that would prevent it working closely with other programs, even those that it competes with.

It is also opening up development through an IDE that uses the Eclipse open-source development tools, and promising faster deployment and ease of use through preconfigured options.

Of course, these are not charitable gestures or the result of some spontaneous embrace of community feeling. The Eclipse IDE apart, there is no broader open-source offering, although it would surprise me if that strategy had not been tabled in discussions. It’s just realpolitik; a sensible admission that proprietary thinking is dying on its feet, in ECM at least.

Internally, it must have taken a deep swallow but perhaps the most significant change is that Documentum is openly saying it wants to be the back end to Micrsoft’s SharePoint Server. For the remaining eRoom customers this might not be great news in terms of future development of that product but for Documentum it makes sense. Even if some of the world is going to move to Microsoft for the simplicity of SharePoint’s content management, there is still a valid argument in bigger shops for a combination of SharePoint simplicity with some more scalable, grown-up ECM at the back end.

Ovum’s Mike Davis says “the 800lb gorilla [has] shaved off the fur and got a six-pack.” Stand by for more slimming down and auto-emasculation among ECM giants.