Over the course of the last year, we've all read many articles on Web services and the various standards forming to address the different levels of the Web services stack (SOAP, UDDI, WSDL, ebXML). The stock quote example is becoming as recognized as "Hello World" from our introductory programming books. From responses to a recent poll in an online magazine, it is evident that there is still confusion over what Web services actually are and how they can be used effectively by organizations. One of the main reasons for this is that Web services are only as good as the service they offer, and that the benefits of Web services often depend on the domain within which they are applied.

This is understandable when you consider that at a basic level Web services are all about exposing, publishing, and invoking a programmatic interface to a business application service. A service that lists addresses and ratings of restaurants within a given radius may be very useful for a travel portal, but it is not useful for telecommunication's IT department building a contract management application for managing service level agreements across network providers. These examples also highlight the different types of service interactions that may be involved in a Web services environment, from intraenterprise and interenterprise to business-to-consumer, and from simple to complex, such as services that exist as part of an entire business process (e.g., contract negotiation).

In this article we will examine how Web services can be used in the domain of content management.

Why content management? Applications of content management illustrate the various types and usage model benefits associated with the new Web services model. We have heard much discussion around the application server market in relation to Web services (the new battle after J2EE), but we have heard little about the other components of the e-business stack, which are often at the heart of applications business logic.

Before we go into the details of Web services and content management, let's recap briefly some of the core concepts of the Web services model and the role of content and content management in e-business applications.

Content-Rich Applications
So what does content have to do with e-business? Quite a lot when you think about it - much of e-business is based around the exchange of information. How could you buy or sell a product without up-to-date product information or a catalog?

The increasing importance of content management as a critical e-business infrastructure component has been driven by the explosive growth in the use of the Internet over the last few years. Until recently, organizations have mainly been concerned with managing their structured data, and gave little thought to how unstructured content assets were managed and controlled. As the use of the Internet increased, and Web sites both internal and external grew in complexity and size, streamlining the aggregation, creation, management, and distribution of content assets became critical for organizations to effectively capitalize on the Internet and move their businesses online.

Today, a Web content management application is vital for organizations moving online, but with the evolution of e-business systems, the management of all content assets becomes crucial. The word content itself is often misleading, as content represents core business assets from contracts and catalogs to product information, RFPs, and even the code that makes a Web site function.

Similar to the last decade in the data-centric world, where the RDBMS started out managing data and evolved to managing higher level chains of business applications, now content-centric applications such as contract management, RFP management, SOP management, catalog management, and so forth, have emerged. These applications are indispensable to companies as they fully integrate and automate their business processes.

An enterprise e-business infrastructure is built from a stack of best-of-breed products such as enterprise information portals, application servers, databases, and enterprise applications (ERP, CRM). The content platform resides as part of a full ecosystem of products. As with other business applications, these content applications are required to seamlessly integrate with both internal and external applications, be delivered through multiple interfaces (portals, Web sites), and, more interestingly, are often based around rich content, which merges content and data to produce a unified view of information. For example, consider a contract, which combines customer information, pricing information, and legal text, or a product catalog, which combines all types of content assets from images and data specifications to SKUs and pricing information.

Now, let's take a closer look at Web services©

The Next Stage in e-Business Evolution
Web services represent an important next step in how we use the Internet, and may revolutionize not only how we think about application development and deployment, but how we do business.

To the extent of creating many new business models, we have seen the impact on every industry of the move from mainframe to client/server to the Internet. However, until recently the use of the Internet was largely concerned with human-based interaction through browsers. The back-end integration between business systems involved a lot of work, never mind considering when this integration occurs across enterprises. There are two reasons for this. Applications are generally developed in isolation from how they need to interact with other applications and systems. And integration generally involves a lot of "hard wiring," a busload of system integrators, and plenty of money.

In today's economy, companies are facing conflicting requirements - a shortage of IT budget but a pressing need to automate their business processes to remain competitive and drive down costs. Due to the ever-changing nature of business, partnerships, and technology, business systems need to be agile and adaptable. They need to integrate with each other across the extended enterprise regardless of the language they are written in, the platform they run on, and where they run.

In the next stage in the evolution of e-business systems, applications will be built from a set of service components that can be published, discovered, combined, and consumed over the Internet. The eventual goal is applications that can be dynamically assembled according to changing business needs, and personalized based on device and user access. In essence, services are self-contained building blocks that can act in a plug-and-play manner with other services to provide business functions that run on any networked platform.

From a technology and investment standpoint, this next stage is an evolution, not a revolution. In today's economy, companies are loath to discard existing investments in their legacy business systems.

The Web services model represents a merging of the distributed systems model with Internet computing. Applications can now be built, and dynamically combined, in a loosely coupled manner using Web services in a distributed networked environment. Web services expose self-contained business functions that are the result of an evolution in programming and application development from object-oriented and component-based models to a services-based model. The move to a service model is distinguished from the traditional component model by the addition of the notion of a service contract. The service contract is what enables complete separation of how and where the service is invoked from how the service is implemented. A service becomes a Web service when it can be discovered and invoked over the Internet. Discovery is based on it being published - in the most basic case in a manual, but most likely in a service registry (e.g., UDDI).

Currently, a Web services contract is defined using WSDL; published in a service registry (UDDI); and invoked over HTTP using SOAP, with XML being the neutral glue. Services can be implemented in any programming language (EJBs, Java Classes, COM, COBOL, C) and can be deployed on any platform (Windows, UNIX, mainframe) as long as it is network accessible.

The real power of services can be realized by the ability to chain them together to build applications that fulfill complex business processes without the need for hundreds of programmers, but rather by business users, or even better dynamically, which is the ultimate goal.

Usage Scenarios
As we have seen, content management is a broad area that deals with the aggregation, creation, management, and distribution of content assets. Content flows across systems and enterprise boundaries (see Figure 1).

The various applications of content management involve the combination of business logic and content. There are four main roles for using Web services with content management:

• Exposing and publishing content management services as Web services
• Invoking Web services as part of content management applications
• Extending business processes intra- and interenterprise
• Managing Web services

Exposing Content Management Components
Business logic encapsulated in core components can be exposed as Web services to provide access through other applications (portals, enterprise applications, and external systems) and to rapidly build new applications by leveraging core services of the content management system - reducing overall costs and deployment time for organizations.

Web services will become a natural mechanism for integrating content management across systems, e.g., CRM, ERP, and portals. Vendors of these products will generally provide the integrations, which are key across the e-business stack, and companies nowadays are pushing for tighter, more complete integration out of the box.

The portal is one very good example. The enterprise portal is becoming the WebTop of the enterprise. Companies no longer want to deal with multiple application front-end interfaces for their employees. Content management is central to a portal in two respects:

1. Enabling employees, partners, and customers to participate in content management applications through one seamless interface
2. Powering portals with accurate content

Documentum, for example, has already released a set of services for portals (eContent services or portlets) that allow for core content management components such as inbox for workflow, subscriptions, and browse to be easily incorporated into any portal.

Exposing these portlets as Web services allows for more intelligence within the portal. Instead of having multiple disconnected components, the components can interact through the published interface. For example, for a customer service portal, a sales support person may look up a customer name through a portlet into the CRM system, while the browse portlet to the content management system automatically updates the contract view to show contracts just for that customer.

Developer and application builders will also leverage core services of the content management platform to build content management applications more rapidly, and will develop their own applications as services that their customers can readily use within the enterprise.

For example, a number of companies develop content management- based applications using Documentum as the foundation, e.g. contract and catalog management systems. These vendors will use the core services of the platform to rapidly build and get their products and ser-vices to market faster. They may want to expose their applications as higher level services to include, for example, contract management as part of an e-procurement system, or for market site providers to easily add catalog management and aggregation for their suppliers.

Corporations will also build Web services to expose their in-house applications both within the enterprise and to external partners. Exposing services will be done using standard interfaces (e.g., RossettaNet PIPs) or by agreed-upon interfaces between partners. One of the PIPS (2A9) is a good example of a content-based service that would be exposed by a corporation to their partners. This PIP is used in the semi-conductor industry and allows for companies to search across partners for information on available components that meet certain criteria. Another example might be a financial services company that would like to provide a new offering to some of its value-added customers by providing access from their portal to certain subscribed research reports.

Invoking Web Services
Content management applications can also invoke Web services to extend functionality. For example, Documentum has many third-party technology providers who provide complimentary technology, e.g., translation software, transformation technology. These third parties will be able to expose and publish their components as services so they can be easily plugged into customers' systems either run remotely by the third party or installed at the customer's site. One example could be transformation. Dif-ferent third parties might offer services for XML to PDF transformation, GIF to JPEG, or even more complex transformation services such as from one catalog schema to another, e.g., RosettaNet to XCBL. Customers could either search for companies that offer these services using a service registry or they could tell the system that they would like this particular document transformed from X to Y and it would automatically find a service that offers this and invoke the transformation.

Extending Business Processes
The business process/workflow around content can be extended to support external sources, e.g., negotiation of contracts, as is common with many applications, and participate in workflow spanning systems and enterprises (see Figure 3).

Managing Web Services
Earlier, we looked at examples of how services can benefit the entire eco-system of content management, but there is also an entire area that deals with how services are created, managed, and deployed.

Web content management has been one of the main applications that has allowed organizations to effectively manage all the content and code that supports their Web site infrastructure. As we now move to the next generation of the Internet, from using it primarily as a mechanism for human interaction to one of machine-to-machine or system-to-system interaction, there will be a need for companies to effectively create, manage, and deploy services. Web content management systems will evolve to fill this need, providing for the versioning and management of services, and the deployment of these service descriptors to registries so they can be accessed.

Content Management Platform Requirements
A scalable, open content management platform is required as the foundation of content-rich e-business applications that enable the successful and rapid integration of content across the entire information chain. The content management platform you select must offer a comprehensive set of services to deal with all aspects of managing your content assets on a global scale. More importantly, this platform must embrace and support the core technology foundations of the next-generation Internet (portals, J2EE, .NET, Web services, XML), allowing rapid development and deployment and easy integration with all business applications.

How Long Will It Take?
We may all have thought that the development of the Internet and the move to the browser happened extremely quickly, but the Web services model is likely to be adopted at an even more rapid pace. There are a number of reasons for this:

• All major platform and infrastructure providers are quickly adding support for the Web services model into their platform offerings.
• Web services are not a revolution but an evolution of investments already made.
• They are simple in concept and leverage existing implementations - the same reasons the Internet was so popular initially.
• They will solve real problems of interoperability across systems and integration of systems components, allowing rapid application development and, eventually, dynamic application development.
• They will offer a substantial competitive advantage through the realization of operational efficiencies from automation across the extended enterprise and the reduction of the huge integration costs incurred by the current model of application integration. These benefits alone will be very appealing to organizations in the current economic climate.

• New business models for software delivery: Pay-per-usage models, pay-per-service, and realization of hosted business models
• Unparalleled scalability using the Internet as the network and all connected devices as the computing power (assuming network bandwidth issues resolved)

Author Bio:
Una Kearns, XML architect at Documentum, leads the development of Documentum's next-generation XML solutions and is responsible for the company's overall XML product strategy and architecture. She is a member of the OASIS board of directors and XML.ORG advisory committee, and is the Documentum representative to UDDI.org and the W3C. She is also an active participant and spokesperson in industry events and conferences. questions@documentum.com