Building a high-performance content infrastructure with Web services. (Internet).

Web Services can fundamentally change how content is created, revised, reviewed, and delivered throughout an organization. Web Services should also change the way businesses view how content contributes to their business processes-and to their bottom line.

Companies now realize that words, ideas, and images-in fact, all expressions of their intellectual property-have value. Managing that value effectively can make the difference between success and failure in a tight economy. Three of the most important ways that Web Services can help companies better manage their content assets are:

* Web Services eliminate geography as a constraint on who can create, contribute to, and use content.

* Web Services enable tailored, browser-based GUI interfaces to manipulate and manage content, so many people previously not involved in the content preparation and publishing process can participate.

* Web Services enable existing applications to be more easily integrated with one another, providing a standards-based foundation for building an enterprise-wide content management solution.

But content has a full and complex lifecycle. To realize content's full value, one must have control over it at each stage in the cycle. And to understand "content management," it's essential to understand how content is managed from its inception, through a review and preparation process, and finally to the point when it is launched in whatever final form it might take--print, PDF, Web content, etc. In other words, the question "Where does content come from?" is much more important than "How can I deliver it on the Web?"

Best Practices for a High Performing Content Infrastructure

As organizations of all sizes and types evaluate and redesign their content infrastructure, three key goals consistently emerge on their content management "wish lists":

* The ability to deliver content to multiple delivery formats.

* The ability to reuse content in different documents or information sets.

* The ability to customize content for particular audiences-or even particular individuals.

These goals, in turn, have lead to three distinct "best practices" that create the foundation for a high-performance content infrastructure:

Use of generic mark-up-XML-to manage content: By virtue of its wide adoption, XML brings flexibility to managing content and reliable standards-based exchange among diverse applications. Creating or transforming content into XML format meets the first business goal above: the ability to deliver content to multiple delivery channels. XML marks up content and labels what it is without making assumptions as to the form in which it will be delivered. By using XML, the same content can be delivered to the Web, to printed format, or even to wireless devices.

Use of an object-oriented approach to store and manipulate content: While XML meets the first business goal, it only provides the foundation for meeting the second. The ability to reuse content in multiple contexts requires that the content be "chunked" into building blocks that can be assembled into content deliverables (documents, Web pages, wireless messages, localized packages, etc). These must be stored in a central repository with intelligence about XML, and then retrieved as needed. Such a repository should have the ability to track the content pieces, assemble them into deliverables (sometimes called XML instances), track various versions of the content, manage the linkages of reused components, and maintain a detailed history of all deliverables in the system.

Use of rich metadata about each object as it moves through its lifecycle: Capturing, storing, and updating metadata about each of the XML objects in the content repository is essential to achieve the flexibility and agility demanded for content in today's world. XML itself contributes to part of the solution in its ability to declare information about the object in the mark-up. The repository, however, plays a key role in both automatically capturing further "metadata" about each object. This metadata provides "intelligent" information; for instance, if a user calls up a specific content object, the system could also automatically call up the application needed to use that object. Metadata also enhances the searchability of content objects. With this high-performance content infrastructure in place, organizations can take full advantage of the added dimensions that Web Services bring to content management. Simply wedding Web technologies to outdated business practices and systems is not progress-and can compo und past mistakes.

The Role of the Web

The use of the Web and Web-based interfaces has become routine in business and everyday life. With this pervasive use comes a set of expectations and conventions on how Web interfaces look, feel, and are used to get things done.

Web-based interfaces have several advantages: they can be cross-platform, they can expose just the choices and information a user needs to accomplish a particular task, and they can be made available anywhere in the world readily and with little or no overhead. Web Services allow content users and contributors to have access to content (and take part in its creation) at an earlier stage and in situations where sheer physical distance prevented participation in the past.

Technically speaking, Web Services are standards-based ways (using XML, the Web, and a messaging method called SOAP) for applications to communicate with one another. Web Services can vary from the most detailed and granular aspect of an application up to high-level services that get triggered by simple requests.

Web Services and Content Management Examples

Here are four examples of Web Services that can be made available to content creators and users:

Assemble and Publish. A training company with a high-performance content infrastructure needs to create a custom training course for a client. The course instructor fires up a browser, goes to the training company's Web site, and accesses a search screen that lets him search on a repository of modularized lessons. He chooses the relevant topics and asks for them to be assembled into course books, and also orders a teacher's manual. The content management system pulls together the XML building blocks from the repository, assembles them into documents, publishes them in PDF form, then e-mails the PDF files to the instructor. (Web Services enabled the communication with the repository, the passing of the assembled document to the publishing application, and the delivery of the PDFs via e-mail.)

Pack and Ship. A professional standards organization has a large library of standards available to its members. A request from a member comes in through their portal for ten standards in printed form. The content management system pulls the latest versions of the standards from the content repository and sends them to a publishing application, which produces a printable PostScript version of the requested standards. The standards and a customized cover letter are printed; at the same time, the shipping department is notified to expect the printed versions of the package and where to send it. (Web Services enabled communication with the order processing system, content management system, publishing application, and shipping department.)

Edit and Proof. An employee of a publishing services provider works from home. Using her browser, she logs in to the company's central repository and retrieves a work in progress with comments from a committee of reviewers. She calls up the XML version of the document in a structured editor on the left of the browser window. She also sees the review comments in a window to the right. After making edits to the XML source file, she clicks a button and the window to the right is refreshed with a view of the formatted document in Adobe's Acrobat Reader. She checks the changes, formats the document again, decides the changes should be effected and saves them back to the repository at headquarters. (Web Services were used to integrate the content repository, structured editor, and formatting application.)

Change Style and Deliver. A sales manager at a car dealership wants to produce a mailing to prospects in his area. He has access to a newsletter describing the latest models, but he wants to customize it to include a picture of the local sales staff and contact information. He uses his PC to log in to the repository that contains the newsletter, clicks on "Submit Local Data," and then sends the JPEG file of the picture and contact information for the caption. He instantly sees a formatted version of the newsletter and decides that the font for the caption should be a bit larger to be readable. He clicks on "Adjust Style," boosts the size of the font, then clicks on "Review." He likes what he sees and clicks "Approve" which starts the process of printing the newsletters and mailing them to the addresses he has previously supplied. (Web Services were used to integrate the content management system and the publishing application.)

These scenarios demonstrate just a few of the tangible business results that can be achieved by leveraging the power of Web Services to access and manage an organization's content assets. But in each case, Web Services is only one piece of an underlying high-performance content infrastructure. Achieving results like these requires the willingness to examine and retool long-standing business processes, as well as adherence to best practices and the use of technology that supports them.

Jon Parsons is the director of product marketing for Xyvision Enterprise Solutions, Inc. (Reading, Mass.)

www.xyenterprise.com