Web Services in Content Management

What is Web Services?

A Web service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It has an interface described in a machine-process able format.
Web Services is another form of an RPC based communications, not completely unlike CORBA or COM+ but its platform neutral.

Steps to implement Web Services

- The service directory is a central place where clients of a web service can query for a published Web Services.
- After clients find the service, the clients have to know how to interact with the service.
Therefore, we need something explaining how to perform operations against a web services. The description will also explain the operations and message format.
- The Service Message is what the client creates to send to the web service to perform an operation.
- Lastly, there is the communication protocol to interact with the service.

Current CMS Functionality

- Library Services
Library services are similar to a library catalog system. It allows certain people to view, check out, review, view meta data, and track version of content.
- Categorization
Most CMS products allow the warehousing of classification terms for the classifying of assets. Then the CMS will store the terms in the library system as meta data.
- Search
This is the mechanism that allows the users to find CMS assets.
- Distribution
This is where many of the products on the market differ. Some product deploys content, to a file system. Others can deploy content to a database. Yet some others can replicate content to a proprietary caching system. Then of course some products perform a mixture of the previous.
- Workflow
Most products have some sort of workflow sub system to allow content creators and managers to implement some sort of business process around their CMS assets. Here some products have a very robust workflow engine and others have very simple engines.
- Transformation
Lastly, most content management systems allow for transformations of content. Either converts XML content to HTML, standard office application files to PDF, or video files to jpegs, and many other transformations.

How can Web Services improve CMS?

In today's business world, enterprise content is a corporation's secret weapon -- and Achilles heel. Corporate records and information, including e-mail are being seen as assets that need to be managed and mined for information.

But there's a downside to all that enterprise content as well. Increasing regulatory requirements for financial reporting, managing health care records, keeping e-mail and more places big burdens on corporations.

To solve the problem, enterprises turn to content management systems. Increasingly, vendors are turning to Web services as the glue that holds content management systems together and that ties them into the rest of the enterprise.

Let's imagine that CMS services can be exposed to other applications through a Web Services interface. The illustration above shows some of the methods that could be made available to other applications, either to invoke within the CMS, or to utilize for content outside the CMS repository.

Consider this scenario. Your company regularly releases new products, both to its e-catalog and out to its distributor channel. Upon doing so, you need to deploy content related to those products to various websites. Using a services-oriented architecture, your company's product data management or e-commerce systems could activate the CMS distribution service to push particular content into production (even related content outside the CMS) when certain products get released. If that's too automatic a business process, the workflow service could be triggered instead, to activate an approval process.

This is possible today in a few of the more developed CMS products that have packaged up their APIs as Web Services interfaces.