A Service-Oriented Architecture for Better ECM
New business requirements are changing the way companies think about enterprise software. Initiatives and objectives increasingly cross traditional boundaries to involve multiple departments, data stores and business processes. In response, the old model of self-contained applications is giving way to a new paradigm based on independent services brought together in dynamic, highly-efficient composite applications. The impact of this service-oriented architecture (SOA) is only now beginning to reach the enterprise content management (ECM) market—but its transformative implications are already clear. To date, ECM has typically consisted of separate applications for managing Web content, revisable documents, e-mail, collaboration, rich media and archival records—each with its own dedicated server, capabilities, workflows and user interface. As long as a company's processes remain confined within these islands of automation, all is well. But once the need arises for cross-functional business integration, so do numerous problems. Business applications incorporating multiple content types—not to mention those that integrate with external systems—are difficult to develop and deploy, requiring custom code to bridge different APIs, interfaces and platforms. Agility and responsiveness suffer, while costs rise. The service-oriented paradigm fundamentally alters this picture. With SOA, business applications and systems are no longer self-contained monoliths, but collections of independent services that can be provided upon request to users or other applications. Using open standards, these services cut across disparate platforms, object models and programming languages to integrate the data and actions of multiple backend systems within a single end-user solution.
SOA also enables business-process solutions that automate multi-step processes—for example, tracking the activities of the participants in a process, or synchronizing data across multiple backend systems. Unlike painstakingly coded custom solutions, SOA-based composite applications can be designed, deployed and maintained quickly and easily—and inexpensively. New solutions can also leverage existing systems, which are "wrappered" to provide a service-oriented interface to their data and actions. As embodied in Interwoven's current ECM platform, the SOA makes it possible to replace a suite of separate content management applications with a unified content application framework. The full range of core ECM functionality can be exposed as services, allowing content type-specific capabilities to be invoked seamlessly from composite applications, external packaged applications, third-party portal servers and business process automation systems. Freed from the constraints of a dedicated interface, users would not need to be "in" an Interwoven application to submit Web content, approve a media asset, archive a document as a corporate record or provision code and content to a production system. Integration becomes a simple matter, often requiring no code at all. The business benefits of SOA-based ECM are broad and compelling. Content solutions can become larger in scope, integrating a wider range of content types. Development and integration become more agile, flexible and responsive to the needs of trading partners.
Consider the case of marketing campaign management: The campaign manager first reviews past campaigns in the CRM system for audience and success criteria. Extracted data and content then become the starting point for the new campaign, supplemented by new text, graphics and rich media content. This content then goes through a cycle of review, revision and approval, partner collaboration, testing and then deployment. Finally, the new campaign is logged into the CRM system for tracking and analysis. With an SOA-based composite application, this entire process can take place within a single Web interface—including multiple content types in separate repositories, as well as in external business systems. The solution is fast and simple to deploy, and easily maintained over time. And this is only one example. As the SOA-based ECM solution makes enterprise content and ECM functionality available to additional solutions throughout the company, the cost savings and business impact are multiplied many times over. SOA is still a relatively new idea in ECM; its benefits are more easily understood by IT personnel than the line-of business managers who make purchasing decisions. From an enterprise standpoint, adopting SOA can seem daunting. But trends in both business requirements and enterprise technology point clearly to SOA as the future of ECM. As its adoption spreads, a new generation of composite solutions will bring new levels of productivity and efficiency to companies—and forever change the way we think about ECM.
Charles Hough is Vice President of Field and Platform Marketing at Interwoven. He leads the company's ECM platform marketing, field training, technical marketing, product management, and the Interwoven Developers Network (DevNet).
Interwoven provides enterprise content management (ECM) solutions for business, enabling organizations to unify people, content and processes to minimize business risk, accelerate time-to-value and sustain lower total cost of ownership. With blue-chip customers in every major vertical market, Interwoven leads the industry with a service-oriented architecture and delivers ECM solutions designed to address specific business processes such as e-mail management, intranets, enterprise Web content management, deal management, marketing content management and more.